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The theory underpinning the different sections of this book is that we need to revisit and critique the traditional concept of the Hero: always spelt with a capital, this Hero is imagined as an antidote to suffering, which actually ‘exacerbates our suffering’ and ‘turns the human condition into a cycle of trauma’ (p. 2). Because the installation of the Hero predicates the existence of a Villain, their eternal and necessary antagonism perpetuates a state of readiness for war or conflict.
The author, born in 1952 and the daughter of a World War II veteran, grew up surrounded by the mythology of good versus evil, but also by the unknowable quality of the Heroic: nobody wants to know the subjective experience of the returning Hero. Heroic mythology is described as a chronicle rather than a narrative: ‘It is primitive, linear, reactive, redundant, impoverished in metaphor, and lacking in reflectivity, symbolic capacity, and intersubjectivity’ (p. 26). It is these latter qualities that, as a psychoanalyst, Grand wishes to promote: it comes as no surprise, therefore, that some of her major influences have been Dori Laub, Layton and Kohut, and that the relational approach is key to her theory.
Her first, and very striking, case-study is that of a Vietnam veteran called Peter. Thirty-five years after his return as War Hero, he is experiencing the coldness of his wife and apparent rejection by his children. During this period he had experienced little remorse for the fire-bombing of villages and deliberate shooting of women, children and the elderly. Rather surprisingly, but very honestly, the therapist reports feeling only disgust and revulsion at this response, and appears to let her strong anti-war credentials overrule any empathy she might feel for the conscript soldier that he was. Until, that is, she is rescued by him from a potentially violent confrontation with another patient's angry husband, and experiences at a very direct, human level, ‘the good soldier’,