War trauma and self-help

Abstract

This study is an attempt to analyze the frontline soldier Farouk's drawings, inscriptions that accompany them and his text entitled "In the time of war", as a form of self-help. The material analyzed includes a series of seven drawings and comments. In the analysis we combine two psychological approaches: the psychodynamic and the cognitive-evolutionary one.Farouk's sketches have a surreal and/or more or less abstract character. They are a clear reflection of the situation in which the author feels caught or even trapped. Farouk's drawings can be treated both as a response to the extreme situation and as a specific attempt to deal with trauma of war.We suggest that the level of abstraction of his drawings indicates the depth of trauma and decreases with the return to mental health and ability to verbalize experiences. We think that enhancing patients to express their traumatic experiences in the form of drawings with comments can be a useful tool of diagnosis and therapy. It can be also a helpful way of autotherapy when the possibility of professionals' assistance is limited.