You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
After the Mass Murders of September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, and with the subsequent terror created by anthrax in the mail, Americans came to identify themselves as under attack, under threat of further attack, and as survivors of attack. Since Pearl Harbor, the entire population has not felt so threatened in its own territory. Yet there are neighborhoods in the United States whose
residents live with violence on a daily basis, such as sections of inner cities with high crime rates. There are first-generation immigrants who come from countries with recent or longstanding histories of war and communal violence, immigrants whose memories and experiences continue to haunt them in this country. There are also survivors of natural disasters, airplane crashes, terrorist acts by fringe groups, and murders perpetrated on groups of people by psychopaths, cult members, and even by the government of the United States itself (as in Waco, Texas). Identification with the victims and survivors of September 11 extended the occasional, local, or particular experience of violence and living through violence to a national scale.
With a renewed interest forced upon us, then, I review a book published several years ago on the suffering and healing of youth living through war and communal violence. The editors of Minefields in Their Hearts are psychiatrist-psychoanalysts affiliated with Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. This volume of twelve chapters is the outcome of a project undertaken by the Children in War and Communal Violence International Working Group (an affiliate of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professionals). The editors state their belief that psychologically informed interventions can ameliorate the injury caused to children by war and communal violence. They also believe that those who work with these children must develop an active commitment to try to change conditio