What's more, the word "healing" promiscuously extends the status of victim to the general public and hence the privilege of being coddled, consoled and pitied, as if we were all casualties and had all narrowly escaped being crushed in the collapsing towers, rather than merely sat safely in our living rooms glued to our television sets.

The mandate to "allow yourself to cry the wounded animal sounds and write in your grief journal," to quote one of several mourning "rituals" Oprah offered her audience after Sept. 11, shows how the contemporary notion of mental health has weakened the inhibitions that once held our sentimentality in check, our sense of shame about self-disclosure, about losing control in public. We have reached unprecedented levels of mawkishness, levels that exceed even those attained by such lachrymose Victorians as Dickens and his devoted readers who wept copiously over the untimely death of Little Nell, a tragedy that would appear to bear some resemblance to the Sept. 11 attack, which, according to one commentator, was so moving that it "burst the clogged, stereotypical male tear duct wide open."

Our belief in the putative healthiness of creating external embodiments of internal states through "art" and "play" therapies, activities that lead to a proliferation of folk ceremonies and homemade tchotchkes: commemorative quilts, the largest hug ever staged in human history (thousands linked arms in a field after the tragedy), and the work of the so-called "Crayola Coalition," a group of school children nationwide who commit their hopes and fears to paper and send them to the rescue workers (often with the help of McDonald's, which includes original artwork -- surely an indication of how highly such drawings are prized -- in each bag of Big Macs and French fries it distributes at ground zero).

We are now taught that it is detrimental to our peace of mind, indeed, to our sanity, to experience emotion apart from its communication, its "release," and must therefore never remain alone with our feelings but seek out an audience to receive our discharges, our cathartic unburdenings, the messy, unhygienic ruptures of our blockages. What we are witnessing in the kitschification of the World Trade Center is how the pressure to externalize, to emote, "to get your feelings up and out of your body" results in emotional exhibitionism, emotional pornography, a need to play to the galleries and ham up our shock and horror as histrionic spectacles that we relish in and of themselves. Internal states retain their authenticity only if they retain some of the solitude in which they are originally experienced, only if there is no audience that needs to be entertained by the trembling of our chins, only if our real responses remain inaccessible to others in the privacy of our consciousness.

The Internet bulletin boards provide one of the most unrestrained examples of the emotional exhibitionism that pop psychology sanctions. The anonymity of the Web eliminated any need for a censoring mechanism to contain the exuberance of our grief and the result was a crying contest to see who could utter the loudest lamentations, the most piercing keens:

"I felt ... disbelief, horror, sadness, and the relentless shedding of tears ... Would I ever be able to enjoy a sunrise again? ... Would food ever taste good to me again?"

"I flipped the tv to the news early Tuesday while putting a workout video in the vcr ... needless to say, i never did work out that day ... Every time i hear or see the news, i cry ... the flags flying all over my city make me cry ... hearing our national anthem through various media makes me cry ... hearing people going around trying to find their loved ones makes me cry ... knowing how many lives were directly affected ... makes me cry ... i've been crying since Tuesday."

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