Voices from the war: Some notes on the emotional experience of the war in Ukraine told by two Ukrainian psychoanalysts

Abstract

Abstract What is the real experience of war? How does our mind react to the sudden threats and losses of our lives, homes, and beloved objects? What understandings can it offer to make sense of the atrocities it witnesses? What adjustments can we carry out in these circumstances? Two colleagues from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and affiliated to the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group and the Institute of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group help us to shed light on these questions by sharing their personal experience and understandings of the current war that started on February 24, 2022 when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. This contribution aims to report their voices and the emotional experience of encountering their stories in order to provide readers with an unsaturated and unmediated contact with at least some aspects of the reality of war.