Original art by Ryoichi Yotsumoto

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     In August 1945, when two nuclear bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a singular event occurred that has and will remain indelible in human consciousness. This event was not a natural disaster, which in most cases are overcome, but a manmade incident perpetuated from that time to the present by images of annihilation, apocalypse, extinction, global poisoning of all living things, and lingering deadly radiation for millennia. In his many books and articles, Robert Jay Lifton speaks to the short- and long-term psychological effects of the Bomb as a trauma-inducing “encounter with death.”[1]

     It is not the nature or technologies of Nuclearism or nuclear warfare, or even the related moral issues we find so onerous; but as a creation of modern science, Nuclearism is (a) under human control, which no one believes to be infallible, and (b) its consequences in a global conflict would by all accounts not only end civilization as we know it, but potentially erase every vestige of it. Our awareness of this condition, even at a low level, is a burden, a form of trauma (Greek: wound): an unexpected violent end to one’s life as well as to one’s culture; a sudden separation from a once-existing continuity. 

     Awareness of potential annihilation fits the general definition of personal trauma because ultimately it is a violation of one’s personal consciousness.[2] We who live in the post-Bomb world have suffered the most severe form of loss: the (potential) loss of a future for humankind—a condition that did not exist prior to 1945. In tandem with our personal trauma, we also live in a state of social trauma that pervades all human activity, including the visual arts. As Jung once suggested, we may have to review all of history in terms of human trauma.

     Thus the premise of this thesis: all human activity now necessarily lies within the traumatic context of the potential for global annihilation. And given that psychic trauma manifests itself in politics, militarism, and social movements, it should be no surprise that it manifests itself in modern art from 1945 to the present time. This study is part of an emerging body of literature about collective trauma and trauma and art in the broadest sense, described by Jill Bennett as “symptomatic of a widespread cultural obsession with memory” coined as the "allure of trauma,” “wound culture,” and “trauma envy.”[3]

• First, the individual experiences shock, disorientation, freezing.

• Second, compulsive revisiting of the original trauma or aspects of it occurs, an attempt at returning after the separation caused by the trauma, accompanied by numbing of emotional affect.

• Third, a gradual translation of the trauma is transferred into symbolic schemes and  dissociation, a prophylaxis from harsh reality.

• Fourth, a period of revisiting follows, taking the form of “reactive transfer rejoining” or “resetting,” where the original trauma is reengaged in emotionally or symbolically intense ways and is now seen more realistically for its violence than was possible during the first three phases.

• Fifth is an implied stage, not described in the DSM-IV-TR, namely, recovery and resolution to some measurable degree.

   According to this writer’s accounting, at least one hundred-plus styles, movements, variations, and aesthetic ideologies have been labeled and described in books on modern art dating from 1945. When we recast the history of post-Bomb, or Late Modern Art, in terms of the phases of trauma, that multitude of labels can be reduced to five psychological or psychohistorical phases. Making slight variations on major categories already in use in the history of art, we can wed the psychological terms applied to individuals by professionals in the field of psychology with demonstrable patterns of artistic production.

 

     In brief, the first phase that occurs immediately after the bombs and the end of WW-II, Phase I, is one of shock. In the visual arts it takes two forms:  (1) an initial severe reduction of works of art produced (in contrast to those produced during the war); and (2) a retrenchment into familiar iconographies of doomsday, apocalypse, and chaos, often combined with familiar religious symbols or images of people caught in an instant in time when everything stops (is frozen); or the artist struggles with the significance of modern physics, the atom, or the new iconographical and psychic image of the mushroom cloud.[13] This phase and the art produced during this time is disjointed, unresolved, and often “suspended” (frozen) among a wide sampling of artists, some of the more notable being Philip Evergood, Richard Pousette-Dart, GeorgeGrosz, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Germaine Richier.

 

   Phase II emerges having greater coherence as a movement; it exhibits a compulsive revisiting of the death-dealing, and human, social, and ecological annihilating effects of the Bomb—its energy, its heat, its explosive power.  Jackson Pollock and his fellow New York Abstract Expressionists or the Japanese avant-garde, including Shimamoto, Shiraga, Jiro, and Tanaka, recreate the image of fission on canvas or in equally bomb-referent or explosive forms. These effects are captured most dramatically by the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S. and Japan, for which reason we identify Phase II simply as Revisitant Abstract Expressionism. Each artist moves at his or her own rate through these phases. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko do not live long enough to test this premise, but Barnett Newman, Pousette-Dart, Germaine Richier, and David Smith do, as do many others. Pousette-Dart and Newman pass through Phases I and II quickly, landing in Phase III where they remain until their deaths, making some of the most dramatic visual statements on a scale rarely seen in American art prior to their time.

     Phase III is identified here as Symbolic Expressionism, a stage covering a much wider variety of artistic movements than is normally associated with the word Expressionism. This stage represents a numbing, a dramatic dissociation from the original trauma without ever leaving it, and a reduction of images to simplified, clearly objective, rationally comprehensible images, “color fields,” and “hard edges.”[14] In the past, artistic movements such as Pop Art, Op Art, Photo-Realism, Hard-Edge, Neo-Constructivism, Minimalism, Neo-Surrealism, and some Environmental works, have been identified as “postmodern” reconstructions or deconstructions of the art of the first half of the twentieth century. On the contrary, this is a critical phase of individual response to recent traumatic events, and it is no less so collectively for the visual arts.

 

     Phase III is no mere reaction to pre-bomb artwork. The work of this phase not only represents a withdrawal from the original source of the causal traumas, of which there are many, but recasts trauma, specifically the intangibility of nuclear trauma, in symbolic terms, perpetually demanding clarity, absolutes, and definition in a world that has become entirely threatening, relative, and in apparent, if not actual, chaotic upheaval. We see an unwritten, compelling drive to give the world simplicity in the face of complexity, unity in the face of a massa confusa, a shattered present. History ceases to be linear, except that it appears to be leading to a projected objective, the “archetype of the apocalypse,” the prophetic “end of the world.”[15]

   Phase III is a phase of denial and obfuscation of reality, a recoil into a narcissistic and tribal egocentrism, qualities that permeate American culture from the 1960s to the present. Absolutes of positives and negatives give rise to extremes, cast in terms such as good and evil, contrasts that set up the polarities that were soon to emerge in the form of Phase IV.

  In Phase IV we see reactionary rejoining of the explosive violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, symbolically and formally acted out in the catastrophe at Chernobyl, and then revisited in the form of elective wars. Each such event retraumatizes and acts out a survival metaphor. To engage in symbolic bloodletting in television, film, and cyberspace, or to perform a survival act by engaging in a war by which many are lost, still serves to externalize the fear of potential and imminent annihilation. We cannot know whether or not Roy Lichtenstein is acting out this survival theme in his prints Wham! and Rat-a-tat-tat; likewise for James Rosenquist in F-111, or the Pentagon by repeatedly issuing statements that “we” can survive a nuclear war. But each seems a delusional performance made significant by the scientific evidence that few human beings, if any, would survive a global nuclear war, and those who did would probably either not survive long or would become something other than what we regard today as sentient and empathic human beings.

     By contrast, Phase IV Abject Art makes that extra leap of the imagination, representing a more volatile phase, one that is most shocking if not stupefying to the general public—and often to art historians themselves, except insofar as a work of art can be said to smack of earlier Dada and Surrealist movements. This phase, identified with “reactive rejoining,” evokes images of violence, anti-violence, sexual explicitness, madness, grotesques, images of rockets and bombs, phalloi and vaginas, to say nothing of public nudity, erotica, exposure in the name of art, and liberally opulent and liberated references to male and female sexual organs (Judy Chicago, Dinner Party, 1979). Anger, rage, attack against all that might be held sacred or in common, or representations of the disemboweled, of autopsied waste or bodies dead or dying, are common to Phase IV (Robert Arneson, Eileen Ettinger, Jean Tinguely, Bruce Conner, Ed Kienholz, George Segal, Yves Klein, Alex Grey, Tetsumi Kudo, John Pfahl, David Wojnarowicz).   The same Phase IV characteristics can be seen in graphic feminist revolts against control and stereotyping (Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Yayoi Kusama).

     One might doubt that this kind of work represents “recovery” from anything, and we are quick to point out that recovery is not what is being identified. This phase is part of a process that permeates a large body of artistic work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This work, sometimes referred to as “abject art,” is often the source of revulsion or other expressions of avoidance on the part of audiences, which is what artwork in this category inherently represents: an unavoidable confrontation with psychic damage.

 

     Phase V represents a questionable phase of resolution—questionable only because as long as the threat of global annihilation exists, images suggesting resolution may only be manifestations of denial. Resolution does not necessarily mean recovery or definitive and permanent healing. Perhaps there is none. What it does signify is a balance between what happens internally to our individual and collective psyches, and the external potential for a great human disaster to occur over which we have no control, raising the existential question that this final stage signifies. Paintings by Ciel Bergman, glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly, and pigment prints by Nikitas Kavoukles each bear testimony to a unifying beauty. Now, while awareness of a nuclear threat and the traumatic image of being vaporized at some unexpected moment still lurks, ever-present in our unconscious, we begin to see an assertion of the equally powerful push for life, creation, and transcendence in our daily conscious expressions.

     When the Twin Towers were destroyed by two large aircraft, the “mushroom cloud” was presented by the Bush administration as the ultimate metaphor of fear. It worked. The terror of the moment became attached to the preexisting unconscious fear of nuclear holocaust, if not global annihilation, doubling the traumatic effect of the attack in New York City.  One of the earliest comments on this theme was made by the late Susan Sontag, who noted that evoking the resident image of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion reifies the unconscious fear of personal and mass extinction by nuclear war.[16] As a symbol, the “mushroom cloud” is the metaphor of our time, an archetype of our unspeakable fear and anxiety, one that has been identified with a tree, a phallus raping the earth, and a poisonous placenta.   In the Middle Ages, the tree was seen as the “world tree,” the tree of the cross that unites heaven and earth.  Hill similarly observes that the tree in “the mushroom cloud has roots that extend into the darkest recesses of the Underworld and branches that reach the stars.”[17]

     All that has been presented so far might be dismissed as a formula artificially imposed on modern art as an explanation for what has happened since the Bombs. Quite the reverse lies behind the conclusions drawn here. Beginning in the mid-1970s, as an art historian attempting to make more sense of the multiplicity of styles in the era 1945 to the present time, major patterns suggested themselves long before the author ever considered the issue of trauma. By classing works of art into large groups apart from their usual assignments in publications on modern art, new terminologies began to emerge as objective classifications. Applying an inductive process to the body of works of art in what Caruth calls a “referential reality,” these patterns produced a phenomenological document of what happened in various classes of images that also betray a common thematic content.[18] The consistency with which these works of art were produced in the times they appear bears its own truth. Later, beginning in 1997, it became increasingly evidence that the psychological stages of trauma formed a near-perfect overlay.

     The five stages or phases of recovery from traumatic events applied to social parameters, versus those experienced by an individual or small group of individuals, deserves additional comment. Before addressing that issue, however, we might point out that it is perhaps no coincidence that the formula offered here for post-Bomb art coincides with the descriptions of group-fantasy cycles for the four stages of trauma manifest in social and early childhood traumatic (psychoclass) imprinting given by Lloyd deMause in his most recent book, The Emotional Life of Nations.[19] His first “Innovative Phase” refers to productivity and individuation that gets “out of control,” followed by anxieties of “growth panic,” wanting to “turn back the clock to more controlled times and social arrangements.”

     While this “Innovative” phase does not represent traumatic shock, it does suggest that retrenchment into images and ideas of former and less threatening times are something one might seek in the face of trauma, as an attempt to find a visual language that articulates the new condition. In the visual arts this pattern takes the form of using familiar symbols, and triptych and diptych formats borrowed from Late Medieval and Early Renaissance altar forms, in order to achieve some kind of control over the newly imposed emotional and therefore symbolic and iconographical crisis.  Examples include Jean Riopelle’s Pavane and Large Triptych, Alfred Mannessier’s L’Empriente, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Grande tavola della memoria, and Barnett Newman’s Vir heroicus sublimis. Thus, deMause’s first “Innovation” period may be seen as a second phase of Phase I Shock when, after an initial period of non-productivity (freezing), the artist seeks to assert an effort to contain the event in familiar forms of iconographical and formal structures. This phase, corresponding to the period 1945-49, represents the emergence of an entire new class or group of young artists groping for control of a relevant artistic vocabulary.

     Phase II spawns movements like Abstract Expressionism in New York and the Mono Ha, Zero, and Gutai movements in Japan. In Phase II, fission on canvas, or the explosive energies of the sculptors’ melted metals under the 4000° heat of the acetylene torch, rare prior to the Bombs, become commonplace. DeMause refers to this second stage as the “Depressed Phase.”[20] The Depressed and the following two phases, “Manic” and “War” phases, have even greater parallels to the phases identified here to describe Late Modern art, namely to Phase II Revisitant Abstract Expressionism, Phase III Symbolic Expressionism, and Phase IV Reactive Rejoining and Resetting or Abject Phase.

     Whether the “Depressed” or “Manic” phase is manifested by Barnett Newman’s withdrawal into his studio, or Jackson Pollock’s abandoning his drinking to engage in a dramatic new style, a renewed intensity takes over their work in times that were otherwise very difficult for most Abstract Expressionists for a variety of reasons.  DeMause describes Depression as “I should be killed” for my wishes rather than “I want to kill others.”[21] He adds that this is the time that the depressed “look for a phallic leader with whom they can merge and regain their failed potency, and who can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a persecutory mommy.”   This inner persecutor often takes the form of the state, the motherland/fatherland, but can also be seen as a deification of the Bomb, as Ira Chernus observes in his Dr. Strangegod.[22]

     In the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, Jewish artists in New York City felt this threat even more acutely than other Americans. While they could consciously consider the distant European Holocaust concluded, the ever-imminent but unrealized threat of global nuclear war, especially after 1949 when the Russians set off their first atomic bomb, became an unspeakable and unconscionable image. That unspeakability (manic denial and dissociation) emerges in a wide variety of formal Phase III expressions.  While comments by the artists themselves are considered documentary by historians of modern art, they cannot be trusted. Artists’ comments are externalized projections teased and muted by the artists’ egos and conscious explanations. When they speak of a “pure art form,” or “pure art,” we must regard these comments with extreme caution because what they think they are doing may or may not wash with what they are actually creating. Whether modern artists were conscious of it or not, whether the relationship of Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Holocaust were seen as correlative events, the “Nazi Holocaust” could be addressed, whereas the Nuclear Holocaust in Japan, or even more terrifyingly, global holocaust, could not.[23]

     During the “Manic Phase” deMause describes “defenses against depressive anxieties” and “grandiose attempts to demonstrate omnipotent control of symbolic love supplies,” and if I may paraphrase, seeking “an antidote to growing fears of disintegration of the self.”[24] Phase III Symbolic Expressionism corresponds to deMause’s Manic Phase. The hardening up of forms and array of artistic movements featuring hard outlines, flattened, two-dimensional planes of color, and minimal compositional form, are soon recognized as antidotes to psychic disintegration that underlie the later phases of Abstract Expressionism identified here as Phase III, Symbolic Abstract Expressionism.

     We can also approach this third “Symbolic Phase” from a Jungian point of view, where the inner energies unleashed by anxiety to the point of mania are released in repetitive symbolic forms, whether in enameled or acrylic colors on canvas or glass light boxes or minimal geometric forms in steel, stone or concrete. Architecture of this period becomes streamlined, inorganic shells for human action. To use a computer analogy, Phase III architecture dominating the fifties and sixties becomes severe and efficient people-processing units. Historians often refer to this pattern of repetitive symbolic form as a manifestation of a mature personal artistic style. It is indeed; but we must also acknowledge the compelling drive that produced such formalistic minimalisms in virtually all media.

     If deMause’s fourth, or “War Phase,” at first seems to be removed from the corresponding Phase IV Resetting/Rejoining - Abject Art, the underlying manifestations or symptoms otherwise appear in parallel. Images in this later phase move toward violence, toward reactive iconographies that represent attack and violation of sensibilities as a kind of indulgence in the original trauma, as if to purify oneself of earlier thought and experience vis-à-vis an artistic process that appears to celebrate destruction.

     “Deconstruction” is a term used to describe art made after the Bombs, wherein artists, writers, and filmmakers consciously “take apart” former art theories by creating similar but different forms.   For example, to deconstruct structuralism, one might undo the flat, two-dimensional thinking in the imagery of Op, Pop, Hard-Edge Minimalism, and Neo-Constructivism, to return to the womb and to the rebirthing of art and the unconscious trauma associated with it in all of its bloody, life-threatening, messy imagery. If we apply deMause’s formulas in these contexts, a deeper psychological value can be assigned to the phases presented here.

     With the employment of nuclear weapons, the future was wrenched from all of humanity.  The linear, Roman-Judeo-Christian, male (patriarchal) perception of history disappears into Now.[25] We have been forced to deal with this loss of a future in one capacity or another, as this knowledge now shoves time in our global face, not only through our awareness of the threat to life, but also through the promise of its extension, based on the technological double bind in which we find ourselves.  The same technology that can extinguish all life as we know it has the potential to enhance it.

     I should like to take this path of logic another step. Lloyd deMause sees our first trauma as our birth, something that is no longer part of our conscious experience by age three. Throughout our lives we are retraumatized. For many, retraumatization occurs on a daily basis in small and in many ways. Each of these traumas causes an impact on the fragmented and disintegrated personality. As Jungian scholars put it, our Ego (Self) attempts to reassemble that fragmentation through our external actions, like buying something expensive, or better, getting a chrome-plated Hummer, while our unconscious acts as a silent partner, standing by, waiting for the ego to die in order to restructure a more coherent assembly.[26]

  Socially, trauma and recovery work the same way. The apocalyptic “transpersonal fire of mammoth proportions” of nuclear explosions is “revelation,” “end times,” and the shattering of all that sentient beings have created as a social structure. But Apocalypse and Armageddon are metaphors for the psychic dissolution and the reconstruction of its internal damaged structure.[27] Our first instincts are to use familiar symbols, metaphors, and group fantasies to mask the shock, followed by explosive auto-revisitations as found among the early Revisitant Abstract Expressionists and by later Rejoining Abject artists. This pattern is then followed by manic controlling obsessions, by which the trauma is nearly covered or disguised, or at least hardened up, managed, mocked, satirized, and popularized in simplistic terms or in super-objective terms in defiance of the death of the ego structure and in an attempt to restructure it in symbolic forms and iconographies (stories, dialectics), only to ultimately succumb and resign to that death which is ultimately an internal, unknowable, ahistorical event. That unknowable event of the wound then manifests itself in open confrontation and rage, and expulsion of the forgotten and intangible actuality of the event. As in a dream, the dreamer attempts to reconstruct the event after awakening, able to retrieve only a small portion. These Phases represent the psychic and artistic paths of post-Bomb art.

     Another way to view this regression into the psyche was noted by my friend and mentor Dr. Jean Palmer-Daley, who observes that our new consciousness of the enormous energies inhabiting the tiniest particles of matter/energy provides another metaphor/fact of the potential for unleashing psychic energies.  Whether global or local, our unconscious awareness suggests a presence that has occupied the human unconscious since August 1945. Its impact on modern art reflects one side of the nuclear button. On the other side is the revelation and realization that from the tiniest particles of matter are resident enormous energies that sweep beyond the imagination of our externalized world. With the unveiling of the power of the atom, the interior of things, including our interior unconscious selves, becomes vitally important, as Freud and Jung have been attempting to tell us.

     We must ask ourselves, “What is the inner core of things?” if for no other reason than we now know it exists throughout the universe, including in the innermost parts of our physical and psychological being. By extension, we intuitively ascribe what we might call psyche, spirit, heart, mind, soul, or the unconscious, to that inner core about which we know and understand almost nothing, even though it most likely underlies every thought and action. Perhaps from the vantage of this microcosm we can look at the macrocosm of how to embrace the paradoxical potential for extinction and its opposite.

     Of course, one might discount the loss of future by claiming that threats of mass death have always been present and have visited humankind frequently in its short history. But the enormity of global annihilation is rarely grasped, and any attempt to make it more real than what exists in the imagination, be it partially manifestm, serves only to fictionalize it and make it less tangible. The latter is important to acknowledge, as the majority of modern artists, regardless of their intellectual or emotional participation in the issues of their time, more often do not consciously indulge in literal manifestations of their innermost and unconscious thoughts, whatever they might be. Instead, post-Bomb artists begin working on a much more abstract and sophisticated level as a common pattern, correlative to the abstraction of the physics of the atom and the new global circumstance; and I would like to suggest they do so intuitively and unconsciously, without the aid of their antecedents in the first half of the twentieth century. The size of works of art globally expands proportionately, as does the radiance, rawness of texture, and thermal heat by virtue of the choice of colors or the metal-melting heat of the oxyacetylene torch, or in the fragmentation of surface and visual space in time.

     Other explanations often given for the size and nature of these new works, such as the artist pandering to the large museums, to corporate environments, or to grandiose forms of self-aggrandizement, is a generalization that simply does not apply to most working artists. Nor can we be satisfied with the notion that late modern artists since the Bombs —and there are a number of recent publications about modern art that begin with 1945 that rarely or never mention the Bombs—have become quite different from their antecedents in the first half of the century.[28]

     New forces are at work pervading the entire postwar environment.  When it became apparent that the Americans had suddenly equaled or surpassed in some  ways the impact and significance of European and particularly French artists, it was not because the Americans were competing with them in some kind of international chess game for innovative superiority. Theirs was a critical path that had to do with ownership of the new terror, the new threat—a new ownership of death by virtue of the American uses of nuclear weapons. The wonder and indulgence of post-Bomb American artists is not about literal representation, but about the awe of the physics of matter, of eternal energies of the stars of the universe, where the tiniest particles could be translated into a thermonuclear explosion “that drives the sun,” as Truman said. Limitless energy, radiation, light, have no boundaries, and in the same way paintings, but also sculptural monuments, could no longer have boundaries, frames, or limits to their size, and change dramatically in radiance of light and color.

     For these compelling reasons we must shift from a dominantly formal and style-based interpretation of Late Modern Art to an iconographical and psychological analysis of form. We can no longer view what has happened in Late Modern Art as a melodramatic reinvention of the abstractions of the first half of the twentieth century, or as philosophical and aesthetic explorations into what art is or is attempting to be, but rather as a symptom of a psychological state. These wonderfully varied and powerful visual statements in all forms and media since 1945 are not just subconscious statements about the human condition as it now exists. They also celebrate the ability to transform psychic energy into a plastic medium or an act that demonstrates the duality of our existence as living and mortal beings.

     Rather than applying “Postmodern Deconstruction” to post-Bomb art, the operative term might be more appropriately Reconstruction after the initial global trauma. It is a rebirth, a renewal, a recollecting of the Self (Renascence) and a rebirth (Renaissance) of life as symbolized by the flowers that exploded from every crack and crevice of the ruins of Hiroshima.

     Weeds…hid the ashes, and wildflowers were in bloom among the city’s bones… Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew.[29]

     Nature itself spoke in the aftermath, as if to proclaim its preeminence over what humanity thought was its own sinister, destructive, and terrible darkness.Nature—whether personified by Shiva, the destroyer and creator of worlds, or the goddess Persephone, who is liberated by her captor Hades for half the year—brings a renewal of art and life, as if to mock the technological hubris of the heroic human ego. Does not Barnett Newman paint over a hot, fire red field across an 8' x 18' canvas with thin “zips” of yellow, Vir heroicus sublimis (“man heroic and sublime”)?[30]   His work is both a celebration and a warning.
 

Footnotes

*This article is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Art After the Bomb: Iconographies of Trauma in Late Modern Art.

[1] The Prevention of Nuclear War, in The Psychology of Nuclear Conflict, ed. Ian Fenton. London: Coventure Ltd., 1986; and espec. Lifton and Mitchell’s Hiroshima in America. A Half Century of Denial. New York: Avon, 1995; Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Owl Books, 1999; and Super Power Syndrome. America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World. New York: Thundersmouth Press/Nation Books, 2003.

[2] Raymond E. Hillis, Psyche and Annihilation, Psychological Perspectives, 16, 1, 1985: 51-73.

[3] Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Ser. Cultural Memory in the Present, Ed. Mieke Bal & Henri de Vries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 5.

[4] Sigmund Freud, essay Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915, cited by Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 30. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 11; espec. 91-112.

[5] Cf. Jerome Radin, The Phantasy of Nuclear ‘Survivability', Psychological Perspectives, 16, no. 1, 1985, 40-50.

[6] John Ferrari, Experts Assess Iraq’s Horrific Toll, Prescriptions for Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, 25, 3, Fall, 2006, 1, 4.

[7] Caruth, 105.

[8] Cf. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, 2005; E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture. The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick (NJ), London: Rutgers University Press, 2005.   Forthcoming dissertations in the history of art cited by the College Art Association of America Dissertations in Progress include: Denise Rompilla, From Hiroshima to the Hydrogen Bomb, Rutgers University; and Susan Jarosi, Art and Trauma since 1950, Duke University.

[9] Sally Yard, The Shadow of the Bomb. Exhib. Cat. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1984; Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War. Vietnam in Art. Exhib. Cat., Whatcom Museum of History and Art. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1990; Monroe, Alexandra, Japanese Art after 1945, Scream against the Sky. Exhib. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994; The Half-Life of Awareness, Exhib. Cat., Tokyo, Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1995; and Mark Holborn, Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photography, exhib. Cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986; Shomei Tomatsu, Skin of the Nation. Exhib. Cat., San Francisco/New Haven: SFMOMA/Yale University Press, 2006; and Charles Merewether, Rika Iezumi Hiro, Art Anti-Art Non-Art. Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1970.

[10] Bennett, Empathic Vision; and Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 32-41. Contrast Caruth, op. cit., who cites the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at least seven times, or the work of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, for whom the Bombs form a thematic red thread through his major works, The Illusion of the End, 1992; Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1993; Simulacra and Simulation, 1994; and more recently Michael Ortiz Hill, Dreaming the End of the World. Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage, 2nd Ed., Putnam (CT): Spring Publications, Inc., 2004.

[11] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Ser. Theory and History of Literature, 10. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1979, 2002 ed., viii, xvi.

[12] DSM-IV-TR. New York: The American Psychiatric Association, 2005, 236-39.

[13] Hill, Dreaming, 43.

[14] Mary M. Watkins, Moral Imagination and Peace Activism: Discerning the Inner Voices,
Psychological Perspectives, 16, 1, 1985: 77-93.

[15] Edward F. Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse. Divine Vengeance, Terrorism and the End of the World. Ed. George R. Elder. London: Open Court, 2002.

[16] Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta, 1966), 208-225.

[17] Hill, Dreaming, 43.

[18] Caruth, 74.

[19] Lloyd DeMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York, London: Karnac/Other Books: 2002, 159, 162.

[20] deMause, 160.

[21] deMause, 161.

[22] Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod. On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons. Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 1986.

[23] Kaplan and Bennett focus almost exclusively on the “Jewish” holocaust and on film (Bennett, Empathic Vision, 3-4, 8-9, 104-105.

[24] deMause, Loc. Cit.

[25] Eckhart Tolle. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New York: 1999.

[26] Edinger, Archetype, 85, 95.

[27] Ibid., 82.

[28] Recent publications on art since 1945 include Jean Leymarie, Abstract Art since 1945, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971; Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000. Ser. Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[29] Caruth, 55.

[30] Dated 1950. Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.

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