¹New York City, NY 10011, USA

Correspondence: Sue Grand, 35 West 9th Street, 1B, New York City, NY 10011, USA. E-mail: dr_sue_grand@yahoo.com

Abstract

Entwining history with clinical process, this paper investigates the gendering of war, and of war resistance. Cultural rhetoric of war relies on constructing an eroticized fusion between heroic performance and civilian desire. This fusion occludes real perception of the war zone. War resistance must break up this erotic fusion, and restore absent images of combat. Gendered protests are necessary to achieve this. This process is traced through war reportage, protest activity, and a clinical study of a "war hero" who recounts an atrocity. Erotic fusion ignites in the analytic dyad, and is broken up by the appearance of an omniscient maternal specter.