Prologue

Our understanding of trauma, especially military combat trauma, remains pivotal to our role as psychoanalysts. Among the issue editors, two of us have served in uniform and another is from a family of a career military member. Moreover, our connection to Washington, DC, as a home of military bases and Veteran centers, gives us additional connection to war trauma.

The articles in this issue are based upon oral presentations and discussions given at a conference sponsored by the Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) called “Trauma and Mind in War and Life: Understanding and Treating Trauma, A Psychoanalytic Philosophical Perspective” held in October 2020. The event was held online about 6 months into the COVID pandemic—the most pivotal global health trauma in at least a century. This connection was not known ahead of time, as planning for the “War Trauma” conference started well before the pandemic. It did solidify the need for a discussion of trauma.

Issue editors were instrumental in planning and presenting this conference. Another of us (JW) knew that it was such a collection of contributions that there must be some way to memorialize the contributions in the psychoanalytic literature for our field. This is especially true as analytic knowledge about war trauma tends to remain buried in between episodes, only to be rediscovered again at the next event.

Though the focus remains “War Trauma,” recent experiences have taught us the need to understand similar traumatic experiences.

In the following issue, we stay true to the oral conference, including the order of presentation. The main presentation is summarized as an article (usually an edited transcript of the talk), and this is followed by a series of interlocutions among other writers, which come from discussion at the event.

We start with “Psychoanalytic Thinking of Trauma as a Work in Progress” by Marion Oliner. Then, “How are, and are not, Psychodynamic Concepts and Treatment Effective in the Treatment of Trauma” by Ro