The Mourning After

One doesn’t heal from war; one learns to surrender to its complicated traumatic impact. As veterans struggle with their losses, they have found ways to address and work through the moral injury and PTS with which they contend. They witness their losses via engagement in community activism, memorializing rituals, and acts of artistic and poetic creation. The Mourning After, a sequel to the award-winning documentary, Leave No Soldier, follows the efforts of some veterans to transform themselves and their communities from bystanders to attuned witnesses of the consequences of war. A round-table discussion by senior psychoanalysts, experts in the dynamics of traumatic mourning, illuminates the therapeutic action embedded in these restorative and redemptive activities. The Mourning After provides clinicians with a deeper understanding of the mental health needs of our returning service personnel and their families. It enriches contemporary psychoanalytic theories of catastrophic grief and mourning.