Effects and Affects of War in Psychoanalytic Practice

War, whether anticipated or not, is not an ordinary event for the human psyche and is accompanied by a series of significant effects. For a human being (the Subject), the war is an intrusion of the Real, an onslaught of what cannot be completely represented in the Symbolic and Imaginary registers. The impossibility of symbolization, along with the excesses of psychic tension, transforms the experience into the jouissance—a psychic pain to which the subject is forced to respond. The war confronts our Ego with the pressures of the drives, which, along with the Superego, the Ego-Ideal, and the Ideal-Ego, result in compromise solutions in the form of symptoms. War produces a series of losses, even if the Subject does not experience the death of loved ones. Each time, when confronted with the effects of war, the Subject develops singular solutions, but there are relatively similar coping strategies that are accompanied by similar affective states—grief, anguish, nostalgia, shame, guilt, hatred, boredom, and so forth. In this chapter, I discuss these affects, which appear in analysands as the result of war, as well as the psychodynamic processes associated with them. This chapter also offers the clinical perspectives of working with the effects and affects of war.