Listening to stories of terror from New York University students and private patients, Dr. Ragen recognized what her own father had endured in the 1940s, before she was born, when Al Capone wanted to take over her grandfather’s business and decided to murder him and his family because he refused.
“My grandfather took precautions,” she said, reporting on what followed. “He hired bodyguards … but one morning on his way to work, three men with submachine guns peppered his car, and even though he survived in the hospital for three months, with police protection, the Mafia infiltrated and poisoned him with a lethal injection of mercury.”
Dr. Ragen’s father lived his adult life under the anxiety of “unprocessed trauma.” She says, “I was one of eight children, but I felt closest to him. Although he never spoke of it, his anxiety was palpable—never absent.”
She says, “Growing up, he instructed us to sit in the front pews of the church, near the side entrance. At the movies with our friends, he told us to get seats by an exit sign. He installed a spotlight in our backyard at night. The keys for the double locks were hung high up on the frames. He installed a trap door in our bedrooms. …”
While at college, she found books at the public library about her grandfather’s murder: Captive City and Man and the Secrets, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover admitted that a month before her grandfather’s death, he had told Hoover of the papers incriminating the Mafia that were placed in a safe deposit box. He had asked Hoover for protection.
Someone in the Justice Department leaked it to the Mafia. Captive City stated that if the truth were known, “half the police force would have jumped out of windows.”
After listening to the trauma victims’ stories of terror, Dr. Ragen was unable to sleep. Her mind raced. She could not concentrate or get rid of the metallic taste of terror. She was haunted by the ash-covered rivers of humanity over Brooklyn Bridge—people fleeing from the inferno. Shell-shocked, her pulse kept time with those she counseled.
Dr Ragen had begun her professional training as a counselor during her seven years as a nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mount Prospect, Illinois. After 9/11, her nerves frazzled, she found sanctuary as a lay Catholic at the order’s convent in Connecticut.
While there, she gave herself up to “sinking deeper into the feeling of powerlessness.” She emerged from the retreat healed, attaining an internal equilibrium, as if being exposed to the poison of 9/11 had driven out the poison injected by the Mafia.
She says, “In 1990, because of a crisis of faith in the field of psychology, I joined your writing workshop at the University of Chicago. But the writing drove me further into the field of psychology, and I began to commute to New York each week to earn my degree in psychoanalysis.”
Today, Dr. Ragen lives in New York, teaches at NYU, and sees private patients. She has published a book about the trajectory of her life that led her to homeostasis.
