This City Is Killing Me by Jonathan Foiles

Author:Jonathan Foiles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Finding out that Robert had grown up in Cabrini-Green didn’t necessarily mean anything. Thousands of people, including several of my other patients, grew up there or in one of the other Chicago Housing Authority high-rises, and their experiences aren’t homogeneous. Most of them, however, experienced some sort of trauma associated with living there. To live in Cabrini-Green or any of the other housing projects was to be constantly reminded that you didn’t matter; you had only to look at the elevators that didn’t work, the graffiti and trash that congregated in the hallways, the crime that grew because the police essentially abandoned the towers and let them fend for themselves. When the police did try to intervene, it more often took the form of surprise knockdown raids rather than the daily work of community policing, hardly restoring trust in their ability to protect and serve.

I could see how a quiet, reserved, quirky child like a young Robert could be ignored. I could imagine how DCFS could fail to intervene, letting him slip through the cracks. I couldn’t imagine the horrors he must have witnessed and the trauma inflicted upon his body, but I believed him. And I could see how, given all of that, he could grow up thinking that he had to be special, different, to be the target of his caregivers’ ire. How he must have hoped he had a special father far away who loved him and would give anything to rescue him from his terror.

According to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, trauma is that which resists words7; it is, in the words of the Lacanian therapist Annie Rogers, “the unsayable.”8 Our body manages to find ways to speak even if our tongue cannot, and I came to see Robert’s delusional system as a series of metaphors for his experience. Seeing how his caregivers (I assume his parents, but one can never be sure) mistreated him and the other children, they must have seemed like cannibals dining upon the children’s flesh, one of the more graphic scenes he recounted for me. His birth father singlehandedly saving him from his would-be assassins was akin to imagining Superman as his father, always ready to swoop in to protect him from harm. The ways in which he felt out of place became vivid reminders that he was not from here, he was different, special. And the hatred he felt for African Americans reflected how deeply the trauma he had experienced had split his consciousness to the point where he disavowed his race to separate himself from his past as much as possible.

All of this is a construct, of course. Therapy involves making a story from a patient’s experience, hazarding a theory about how things got to be the way they are and what we can do to provide healing. I do this for all of my patients, usually mentally but sometimes working it out with a group or writing it down. I don’t mind sharing it with them; I have a policy of answering most questions they may ask as long as we can discuss it afterwards.

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