The psychotherapy of Vietnam combat veterans poses unusual challenges: Major trauma occur at a developmentally vulnerable time and under conditions of minimal social support. Difficulties are often triggered by the death of a close "buddy." The psychotherapist is drawn into this chaotic maelstrom and is necessarily at risk herself. In this paper relevant principles are enunciated and a detailed case presentation provided.Man-oh-man, Cowboy looks like a bag of leftovers from a V.F.W. barbecue. Of course, I've got nothing against dead people. Why, some of my best friends are dead. (10) In previous papers (6, 7) I shared my experiences of the past 13 years in the treatment of Vietnam combat veterans. My interest in-but actually my need to write about-the treatment of these veterans initially stemmed from anxiety provoked in me by "the patient who reports atrocities." In a paper (6) by that name, I called attention to the potential for a negative reaction when the patient revealed participation in war atrocities.In this article, I will present a brief historical review of combat psychiatry and argue the inadequacy of earlier psychoanalytic theories to fully appreciate the deforming impact of catastrophic stress, particularly combat, on psychic structures. The expanded conceptual framework available to clinicians today draws on our greater understanding of: stress response syndromes (11); object relations theory (12); issues of narcissism (13); and the work of investigators such as Mahler (15) on separation-individuation. Since many Vietnam veterans served in combat during
and too many others. It was chosen before the pandemic, with its disproportionate, deadly effects on communities of color. Those realities nevertheless mark this issue. They resonate across how these essays theorize rage, harness rage as a resource, and use academic work to help foment the productive rage that forces change.The links between women and anger, feminism and rage, are long standing. "Anger is a really rational response" to everything that women have had to face, Soraya Chemaly (2020, 761) recently noted in Signs. Decades of feminist work have conceptualized women's anger as both burden and power, theorizing the transition between them: "Focused with precision," as Audre Lorde writes, "it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change . . . useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being" (1981, 280). As a burden, rage can push into madness, the social edge of saying "No" to all that others accept. 1 Used effectively, rage is a kind of liberation: "The freedom of the wholly mad" as Adrienne Rich writes, "to smear & play with her madness / write with her fingers dipped in it" (1973, 27).Yet feminist rage is never identical or symmetrical. The resentful anger of right-wing white women, for example, is nothing like the rage of women of color, who are expected to assume a disproportionate burden of affective labor and never to show anger for the insults that they face: "rage under harness," Lorde (1981, 280) calls it (see also Kalish and Kimmel 2010). 2 Some-perhaps
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