It will be a long haul to recovery for the firms that lost everything in last week's World Trade Center disaster, and whose traumatized staff will have to learn to cope with the daily challenges of work life again.
"Nobody has any experience with this degree of trauma," explained New York business psychoanalyst Kerry Sulkowicz.
"The consequences of this will not just been felt over the next week or two. We are talking about months."
Hundreds of firms, many of them in the financial sector, had offices either in the 110-story twin towers that dominated the Manhattan skyline or in neighboring buildings that were partially or completely destroyed when two hijacked passenger jets slammed into the Trade Center on September 11.
A total of 5,422 people are still registered missing one week after the disaster. On Tuesday New York officials said only 218 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage, and only 152 of those had been identified.
Some, like the British-based firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, paid an overwhelming human price.
The firm lost 700 of its 1,000 employees -- every single person who was in the firm's offices on the 101st to 105th floors of the north tower when one of the kamikaze planes blast a blazing hole through the building beneath their feet.
And on Tuesday city mayor Rudy Giuliani warned that chances were minute of finding anyone else alive in the smoking debris.
"We will still conduct operations as a rescue operation," he said at a news conference. "But we have to prepare people for the overwhelming reality that the chances of recovering people alive are very, very small."
Even where staff managed to escape the fiery buildings, coping with traumatized workers will be as essential for surviving companies as finding new premises and computer equipment, or piecing together lost accounting records.
"Some people have survivor's guilt," said Sulkowicz, who works with Wall Street's financial firms as well as private clients.
"Others will experience personality changes -- a greater incidence of anxiety symptom, depression, irritability, anger, a lower frustration tolerance."
These emotions could push employees into taking excessive risks or showing other forms of self-destructive behavior. It could also render them incapable of taking risks altogether, hindering the company's ability to make important strategic moves, she said.
Some survivors are also likely to suffer physical traumas, such as insomnia, and develop a dependency on alcohol or tranquilizers.
Sulkowicz said World Trade Center companies were being extremely sensitive to these emotional concerns, and several had already contacted her.
"What I am more worried about is when life seems to return to normal. That may be when some of the psychological problems start to surface," she cautioned.
Sulkowicz said it was vital for firms to set time aside for employees to talk to each other about their ordeals as often as necessary -- maybe daily, maybe weekly -- either in formal or informal sessions.
"The danger is if people think they can just go back to business as usual and never talk about it again," she warned, adding that merchant banks and trading houses were especially at risk.
"A lot of Wall Street firms have a very macho, male-dominated corporate culture. Part of that culture is one that is so dominated by action, there's little time for reflection," Sulkowicz said.
"Those are companies I am particularly concerned about because there is so much emphasis on work and action that they may give short shrift to allow their employees to express themselves."
And moving offices would add to the strain.
"Moving is stressful under the best circumstances," she said. "In this case, the move is a constant reminder of the disaster itself” -- NEW YORK (AFP)
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