Afterword

In this project of assessing the contributions of Chaim Shatan’s work on veterans, war trauma, and recovery, I want to begin by noting a striking and unusual aspect of this collection of essays and commentaries. The writers here span an extraordinary range of experiences and generations, across close to 70 years. Let me follow the genealogy. I will begin with Andrea Recarte, the person whose work anchors and inaugurates this publication. She is the psychologist who brings Shatan back to our attention, finding his papers at the New York University office of the Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, under the guidance of Lewis Aron. Recarte wrote a doctoral dissertation at City College, City University of New York, under the direction of Eliot Jurist and with my participaton as a committee member. Recarte represents a new generation finding lost work and a lost voice, a repetition that occurs over and over. We, the journal, our current community of analysts and social analysts are indebted to Shatan and to Recarte for his reappearance.

Turning now to the discussants and commentaries, I want to notice the amazing spread across generations of analysts writing about war trauma. Edmund Levin begins as a psychiatrist, in the military during the Korean war and working with war trauma in a long career. Shatan, a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who working with Robert Jay Lifton and others, made innovations in practice with Vietnam veterans, got PTSD into the DSM, and wrote our target essay, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” a critique not of soldiers but of militarism. Two psychoanalysts, children in World War II, one with a father in the Canadian army (Harris,) one in Europe with parents in the resistance (Davoine), both grow up into the 1960s anti-war,anti-imperialist, and feminist worlds. From Davoine’s and my respective work over decades, it is clear that the shadow of World War II marked our minds and ambitions and projects in distinct ways. Boulanger, a prominen