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War and the Soul

Written by a psychotherapist, with more than 25 years of experience in working with Veterans and civilian survivors from World War I to the Iraq War, War and the Soul presents a powerful addition to mainstream models of trauma recovery by addressing the moral and spiritual nature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its treatment. The text is divided into three sections. The first section of War and the Soul describes the transformations of the soul in response to war and creates a psychospiritual context within which traumatic stress can be understood. The second section From Myth to Reality brings alive the struggles of returning combatants and civilians and explores the moral and spiritual dimensions of their struggles. The third and final section The Long Road Home, which ties up the package by outlining holistic avenues to address combat wounds, and extends traditional psychological models by drawing on world spiritual and religious traditions. In this review, I explore three pivotal themes in the text: (1) Dr. Tick’s application of depth psychology to war and combat stress, (2) his analysis of the modern experience of combat stress, and (3) his critique and reconceptualization of mainstream treatments for PTSD. First and foremost, this book represents an analysis of war and combat stress through the lens of Jungian depth psychology. Dr. Tick argues that one of the reasons we have been unable to eradicate war is that we ignore its fundamental roots in the mythic or spiritual realm. Rather than seeing war as rationally driven by politics and economics, he ties the origins of war to the irrational realm of myth as reflected in the stories of war-like gods or godkings that are fundamental to many world religious and spiritual traditions, from the Iliad of the Greeks to the Hebrew Bible. He suggests that archetypes such as the warrior represent ‘‘fundamental forms in the human psyche, innate to all of us’’ (p. 29), which drive us as though unconsciously possessed to assume the mantle of war at whatever cost as an individual and as a society. From this perspective, salvation lies in becoming aware of the sway of these archetypes and making conscious choices to live them out metaphorically, in ways that serve to create peace and not war. Because the mythic realm is synonymous with the spiritual realm in the Jungian universe, Dr. Tick’s framework redefines the landscape of war as the landscape of mythology. The central actor is the psyche, originally understood as the soul.