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.
The panel ‘The Soldiers Project: A Psychoanalytically-informed Free Clinic for Military Service Members and their Families,’ chair: Kate Schechter (Chicago, USA) began with an introduction to the Project by its founder, Judith Broder, from Los Angeles, followed by a clinical case presentation by Broder's colleague Carol Tanenbaum. Pablo Cuevas Corona (Mexico) and Haim Knobler (Israel) then commented on Broder's introduction and Tanenbaum's case, allowing for the development of a comparative perspective on the contemporary psychoanalytic treatment of war trauma in various regions. Cuevas Corona and Knobler augmented their theoretical presentations with rich explorations of their own psychoanalytically informed treatment work with traumatized individuals in Mexico (with earthquake survivors and with soldiers) and Israel (with soldiers). This was a moving panel that had much of the feel of a working group since most of the members of the audience also treated survivors of severe trauma and contributed descriptions of such efforts in various countries.
The Soldiers Project, initiated in Los Angeles by Broder and colleagues and then copied in several other cities in the United States, provides free treatment to soldiers traumatized by their service in US military involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The soldiers who come to the Project are not for the most part in traditional psychoanalysis but in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at varying frequencies. A central emphasis of working with this group of individuals, all of the panelists agreed, was the need for the therapist to struggle with his or her own resistances to full exposure to profound traumatic suffering. As Tanenbaum described her own initiation into working with this population: ‘I had to deal with myself, because more and more my response to military violence was making me wish to turn away, to avoid seeing their trauma, safely splitting my orientation into a “me” and “them,” into “good” and “bad,” “righteous” a