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Yvonne Roberts says now is the time for America's belief in therapy to be embraced by its leaders.

The day the world was irreversibly altered. Survivors, eyewitnesses and rescue workers; relatives and friends, many of whom were the recipients of desperately moving and courageous last messages of love conveyed by mobile phone - in the long and terrible aftermath, how will they cope?

How will America's citizens come to terms, on a personal and private level, with such a cataclysmic series of acts? How too will they make sense of the individual role that was cast for many of them by an accident of fate? One man, for instance, arrived 10 minutes late for work at the World Trade Centre because his baby had kept him awake. He lived, many of his colleagues died.

Barbara Olsen wanted to have breakfast with her husband on his birthday so she changed her Monday flight to Tuesday. She took American Airlines flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon. Theodore Olsen's birthday will be forever branded. "I wish it wasn't so," he said simply, "but it is."

The American writer, Jay McInery, has described the confusion of emotions experienced by many New Yorkers. "I want to hug strangers. I want to hurt strangers. Everyone I have spoken to is feeling indiscrimnantly compassionate and furiously vengeful."

Americans are accustomed to living in a society in which violence fills the TV screen and documentaries peddle gory criminal reality. None of this could prepare them, or us, however, for viewing death "in real time", as one man put it. Spectators in the street cried as bodies fell from the World Trade Centre.

Ironically, perhaps, that for which America has often been mocked and derided, may now stand it in good stead. At times, it has appeared as if the entire country is either on the psychiatrist's couch or buying self-help manuals by the truck load when not learning how to love its inner child.

Self-esteem is the most used phrase on the American talk show circuit. Oprah Winfrey has popularised the language of therapy and given credence to the basic "right" to feel good about yourself - and to do something about it, when you feel bad.

A cynic might call this an exercise in national narcissism; a degree of self-absorption that only the richest country in the world can afford. But, during this still unfolding crisis, as each day triggers a fresh maelstrom of conflicting emotions, it has to be a bonus that therapeutic discourse is such a strong tradition. And the expectation exists that a person will seek help. Britain's stiff upper lip, thankfully, is alien to the USA's caring professions.

How America, as a super-power, deals with its new vulnerability is now preoccupying international politics. The language is extremely bellicose. If only George Bush and the hawks in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill would, like so many individual Americans, look inward and, out of the trauma, fashion a matured psyche for the nation; one which does not feel the need to hide its fears and insecurities with mass retaliation and destruction.