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The traumatic stress faced by soldiers creates many still largely unresolved dilemmas for the governments that send troops to fight. Jan Haaken’s compelling documentary, Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines, meaningfully addresses several of them through the lens of one central question: “Can a combat zone be turned into a mind zone?” A mind zone is a zone where mental processing can occur. In contemporary theory (e.g. Fonagy et al, 2002), “mentalization” refers to the sense of having a mind, or, in other words, a perspective on reality that is one’s own. Through mentalization, trauma can be transformed from an overwhelming shock felt as a dead weight upon the self to something that can be thought, an event about which one comes to possess one’s own individual perspective. Effective psychotherapeutic treatment of wartime trauma, then, like all that of all trauma, depends on enabling the patient’s capacity to think for him or herself. However, when psychotherapy is paid for by the Army and functionality is the goal, some forms of thinking for oneself, or even thinking at all, are likely to be seen as counter-productive.
This predicament is evidenced in the military’s need to train soldiers for unreflexive instantaneous action and the soldier’s need to feel that there exists some good reason for placing himself, often repeatedly, in a position to kill or be killed. If the therapist believes that psychological wellbeing depends on the kind of autonomy that entails a reflexive thoughtfulness about one’s actions, then there seems to exist an inherent conflict for the therapist between serving the patient and serving the “mission.” An additional complication for therapists is the fact that a soldier’s psychic health may be significantly impaired should he lack the ability to critically reflect upon the mission and return home to face potentially vehemently expressed opinions that the mission to which he has been committed was questionable or even futile, if not com