To survive after near annihilation is to acquire a special knowledge of death that transforms life forever after. So believes Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatrist who titled his famed 1967 study of the Hiroshima survivors Death in Life. Few behavioral scientists have studied plane-crash survivors; after all, there have not been very many. But Lifton and some of his colleagues believe that the men and women who have lived through air disasters have something in common with those who emerged alive from the atomic holocaust of 1945.
The psychological effects of disaster are intensified by the swiftness with which it strikes. The crash in the Everglades of a Miami-bound jet last fortnight came as a complete surprise.
Graduate Student Joseph Popson remembered reading a book one minute and the next, "waking up in a puddle of water with one shoe, my jacket and glasses gone, and an engine lying not far from my head." To cope with their helplessness in this sudden shift from calm to catastrophe, people begin almost at once to experience a kind of "psychological closure" or "psychic numbing"—they "simply cease to feel," Lifton explains.
Occasionally numbing can show up as forgetting. One Florida crash survivor, George Gaudiello, reported that "my wife tells me she unfastened my seat belt and we walked to a group of people who seemed in fairly good condition. I have no recollection of this."
Denial. Several passengers numbed their terror with trivial distractions. After helping free a fellow passenger from the wreckage, Thomas Rothenberg, a warehouse supervisor in New York City, stood around with three other survivors and, he said later, "talked about what we did for a living." Stewardess Beverly Raposa led Christmas singing, afterward recalling, "We didn't do very well on Frosty the Snow Man because no one could remember the words."
Sometimes numbing takes the form of inappropriate behavior that helps people deny what they are really feeling. When rescuers reached the scene of the recent crash in the Andes, they witnessed some bizarre behavior on the part of the men who had cannibalized their dead companions (TIME, Jan. 8).
Trying to identify the 29 bodies, one survivor tossed a trepanned skull to another and said in a jocular way, "You should know who this guy is; you ate his brains." Macabre though this sounds, it is also an understandable manifestation of the need of the living to conceal—chiefly from themselves —how devastated they felt by the circumstances of their survival.
Some survivors may not fully realize for months that they have been in an accident. A week after the crash near Chicago's Midway Airport last month, Psychiatrist Edward Stein of the University of Chicago Medical School interviewed eight survivors. "No one," he says, "was overwhelmed by anxiety," though "there were bad dreams" and "a great deal of psychic denial" of the threat of death. "It's like the pupil, which contracts in bright light to avoid being overstimulated. This is good, healthy adaptiveness," Stein explains, adding, "The question is, will the pupil dilate again in the dark—will these people find a way to assimilate this trauma into their lives?"