War and the Soul

"He’s a psychotherapist, but he has a very spiritual way of looking at therapy. He has spent decades treating veterans from Vietnam onwards, and he tells some remarkable stories in the book. But what’s so compelling is the way he takes a spiritual approach. His argument is that in classical and native American tradition, serving as a warrior was an archetypal experience characterized by initiation of young men and, then, later, rituals of purification and cleansing that help them to undergo a sort of psycho-spiritual re-birthing process and return to civilian life, not just as civilians, but as individuals who’ve gone through a profound transformation. And that transformation was acknowledged by the wider society. “I’ve never used the word ‘cure’ when talking about PTSD because it makes it sound like some sort of disease. I like to see it as an injury at the level of the soul.” In the book, he argues that this has completely broken down in our modern society, and that lies at the root of many of the problems that veterans face. His argument is that we may not be able to get rid of the trauma, but we can help a veteran to grow more soul around the trauma, and that’s the ultimate remedy. He looks at how we can, in a way, return to those ancient traditions in order to achieve that in a modern context. That’s part of the argument. I’m particularly interested in the native American tradition because I’ve been to a number of sweat lodge ceremonies myself, held in the UK, which are conducted to make a powerful catharsis experience for all the participants. I’ve experienced the power of it at first hand. But he is making a broader argument about the way we look at war trauma. It’s not something that has symptoms that can simply be medicated away or treated through individual therapy, although that can be helpful. He conceives it as a much bigger task for the society as a whole. We need to recognize that many veterans who served in combat have gone through a form of ‘psycho-spiritual death.’ They can become trapped in this no-man’s land when they return. In a sense, they’ve lost a part of their soul. His argument is that we need to come together to acknowledge that soul-loss and help veterans find ways to retrieve it. That might be through rituals, partly, but it is also a much bigger process of recognizing the injuries that war does, not just to the individual, but to society as a whole. That’s right. Certainly in the US, the sheer scale of deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan means that there are many thousands of people who are in need of help. What I love about this book is that he is really setting out an agenda for how we might embrace this problem on a societal level, rather than relegate it into the task of an individual to return functioning. He is acknowledging that this is a collective wound to the whole of society, and that all of us are affected in some way. Rather than shut these people away and categorize them as ‘damaged veterans,’ we should be looking at our own part in the system that wages these wars and seeing how we can provide this collective catharsis, which I think is so important. That’s the debate that we need to be having in Britain as well."