Air Crash Survivors: The Troubled Aftermath

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?"

What can make that process difficult is "the guilt of the survivor"--the usually irrational feeling in those who have survived concentration camps, atomic war or natural disasters that they may somehow have caused the deaths of others, or may have deserved survival no more than others. Stewardess Sharon Transue, for one, reported after the Florida accident: "I kept thinking, I'm alive. Thank God. But I wondered why I was spared. I felt, it's not fair; everyone else is hurt. Why aren't I?" Recalling his own escape from a crash at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, Geologist Richard Ojakangas remembers:

"The plane burst into flames, and my son Greg said, 'Dad, there're still people in there.' It's wonder I feel. Why did we get out and not them?"

Some survivors conclude, unconsciously, that they got out because they possessed a kind of magic invincibility For them, survival is "the moment of power," as Social Critic Elias Canetti puts it, and can confer a lasting sense of being in command of death. In other cases, a feeling of invulnerability precedes survival and can produce a cavalier attitude in the midst of danger. John Rauen Jr., a former Marine who survived World War II combat, reports that "I knew we were going to crash, but I didn't expect to die." Psychiatrist Stein calls this mental invincibility "the silver bullet reaction"--the conviction that "nothing can get me but a silver bullet."

More often, according to Lifton, a brush with death has long-lasting effects because it brings the survivor face to face with his own mortality, especially with the possibility of "premature death and unfulfilled life." Many survivors remain forever "in thrall to their death encounter." For some, the "death spell" takes the form of "fascination with scenes of death and devastation." Others grieve because they have lost their "innocence of death."

As Lifton sees it, every survivor faces a major task: to overcome his psychic numbness, to open himself to his real feelings and to find meaning and value in his encounter with death. "The result," Lifton told TIME last week, "can be an increased capacity to feel, or even the kind of expanded consciousness that many seek in drugs or meditation." It can lead also to a sense of rebirth. Ojakangas finds that "things are different for me now. I appreciate everything more, my children, my family, everything." But he is concerned: "I wonder how long these feelings will last. Will I become too busy again to remember?"

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