Trauma literature often focuses on the suffering of war victims, yet detailed clinical accounts of the specific challenges of combat-related trauma remain scarce, especially regarding the fear of change and the defenses it mobilizes. This paper presents dissociative phenomena in patients who participated in combat and experienced an unbearable inner conflict “between the old peace-ego and the new war-ego” .

The clinical cases show how, to avoid this conflict, patients create a dissociated state in which experiences of helplessness, chaos, and threat are transformed into a sense of omnipotence. This state serves a paradoxical function: it preserves omnipotence while protecting against change, which is felt as an existential danger. Analytically, leaving this ‘inner bunker’ involves significant risk, namely confronting one's vulnerability and the intolerable aspects of internal conflict.

These examples illustrate how the conflict emerges in the transference through sadistic impulses, and how dissociative structures function both as obstacles and necessary protections. The central question is how analytic work can loosen this defensive rigidity and make transformation possible.