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'The Hour of Lead'
| Article
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20460 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
1,934 Words |
| Author
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Beryl Lieff Benderly
Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author of Dancing Without Music:
Deafness in America, Thinking About Abortion, and The Myth of
Two Minds: What Gender Means and Doesn't Mean, which won
honorable mention in the 1988 National Psychology awards for
Excellence in the Media. |
AFTER GREAT PAIN: A LIFE EMERGES
Diane Cole
New York: Viking, 1992
208 pp., $20.00
ORDINARY WOMEN, EXTRAORDINARY LIVES
Marcia Chellis
New York: Viking, 1992
235 pp., $20.00
The federal government already has scores of boards and independent agencies, but I'd like to propose another that we sorely need: a National Commission to Safeguard Endangered Words. This body would assure that useful terms with clear, established meanings cease disappearing into trendy psychosocial euphemisms. We lately suffered the loss of gay, in the sense of lighthearted, merry, and carefree, which left a sizable hole in the language.
We're now in danger of losing survivor, an austere word that for centuries has meant "one who outlives something" or "one who lives in spite of something." It now appears threatened by pop psychology writers who would use it to mean "someone who has experienced trauma or adversity and overcome its effects." The original sense alludes frankly to the possibility of death, to escape from mortal danger; we speak of survivors of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, of cancer or plane crashes.
But now, readers of popular psychology hear increasingly of survivors of incest and alcoholism, of drug addiction and homelessness, conditions that, though painful and difficult to overcome, do not rate as immediate threats to life. One simply does not "survive" them in the same sense as one remains alive despite a fire or sinking or epidemic.
The misapprehension arises in part because popular psychology has fastened onto two notions developed from the study of individuals who have survived great calamities: the "survivor personality" and the "survivor mission." The former, distilled by researchers from accounts of calamities, is a resilient spirit that actively confronts and surmounts a peril, draws strength from the experience, and looks back on it as in some way valuable or formative. The latter is the need that many survivors feel to retell and interpret the experience, to give it shape and moral meaning through that retelling, to make memory serve as both memorial for those who did not survive and inspiration for those who come after. "And I alone have come back to tell
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