The War in Ukraine: Commentary on Romanov and Fonda

This project opens with Michael O’Loughlin’s evocation of Wilfred Bion’s experience in the First World War as he introduces readers to Igor Romanov’s harrowing personal account of his current life in Ukraine and then Paolo Fonda’s response to that paper, written with feeling and identification, but inevitably operating from some experience of distance. Fonda takes us back to his traumatic engagement with the war in Yugoslavia unfolding after 1991. I feel, in both writers, the haunting presence of trauma and most acutely the register and residues of shame that trauma produces in those directly suffering and those also kept at some remove.

Now I take up the project of discussion and commentary, but deeply aware of the distance and sites of safety from which I write. Each of the authors notes the powerful intrusion of shame in the trauma of witnessing and of being subject to violence and danger. My shame is different. It is the shame of trying to bear witness while so deeply protected and insulated from this danger and from the inevitable traumatizing aftermath of absorbing war at close hand. I speak of my shame with both reluctance and the need to distinguish how this term is being used.

My shame is linked to the neglect, the turning away, the refusals to move from witness to activism. My generation took to the streets in reaction to the war in Vietnam, took chances, risked often deeply important hopes and plans, had colleagues and friends sacrificing freedom and sometimes lives in the spirit of protest and determination to oppose the war, its inequities, its trauma-inducing realities.

These essays bear witness and ask for witnessing from readers and from this discussant. Each writer wants to imagine a witness and containing role for psychoanalysis. Romanov speaks from the epicenter of danger but notices also the internal pressure of denial which he names as a kind of perversity.