Moral Injury: The Soul at Work and War

Abstract: This essay excavates archives of trauma, medicine, and empire to analyze the proliferation of "moral injury," a diagnosis mobilized in the United States' twenty-first-century wars and since taken up by workers on the home front. In many ways, US neurology and the attendant sciences of the psyche were born of war, as medical professionals and later soldiers themselves identified the psychological injuries of combat from the Civil War to Vietnam in a transit that reveals a peculiarly American military-psychological complex and its ongoing trauma historiography. The essay argues that the charge of the moral reveals a tension between the religious and the secular, as well as the so-called Right and Left, and charts how these designations do not always align in expected ways. Ultimately, this history of the present raises questions about the power of moral claims in a postsecular age.