Response to Bagan, Danylevska, and Ilyukhina: The drones of Thanatos

ABSTRACT Our Ukrainian colleagues write from the epicenter of a war that ripples outward, touching us too as distant neighbors in a global economy and community. This response summarizes their experience and focuses on a significant pattern that stands out amongst the many ordeals: the impact of multiple, simultaneous, and cumulative losses which combine, becoming a “complex-context,” a disturbing addition to stress on relational connections. The implications of this are explored along with the way self-experience is affected. These therapists offer poignant glimpses into the difficulties of being a “Relational Home” to patients when both are thrown into a collective tragedy. We in the US, may wish to respond in kinship, in turn becoming their Relational Homes, but we must then in addition to understanding the existential phenomenology that is integral to all human lives, find analogs relevant to their gritty experience: uncertainty about basic survival, ruination of home and other symbolic objects, brutal intrusions including the news of atrocities, and the terrifying destabilization of familiar selfhood. Using an intersubjective-systems theory perspective on working with trauma I offer a possible way that we in the USA can derive analogs from recent American experience.