Requiem for Vietnam: Reflections and Countertransferences of a Psychoanalyst

As a psychoanalyst with forty years of clinical experience with traumatized veterans, I began this paper as an exercise in my own life review, chronicling the lasting impact of treating war trauma on the therapist. I was curious to examine to what extent and in what form emotional memory—including countertransference from these treatments—might continue to occupy part of the internal landscape of the analyst’s mind. Over time, and somewhat unexpectedly after a trip to Vietnam, my life review and reflections evolved to include the views of former patients themselves, an informal thirty-year follow-up on veterans whose original treatments colleagues and I documented in Vietnam: A Casebook.