Dreaming of war

Frosh, Stephen (2024) Dreaming of war. In: Shumylovych, B. and Zolkos, M. (eds.) Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine: Imprints and Dreamscapes. London, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781032582191. (In Press)

Abstract

The Ukrainian dreams and war diaries can be thought about as inhabiting a dreamscape of fear and desire. The expressiveness of these pieces of writing is very striking: how prescient they are, how they convey the turmoil, threat and reality of war, how much they evoke the emotional ‘harmonics’ of the situation. They overlap greatly in tone and content, even though the diaries are by their nature more geared to actual events. It makes some sense to treat the diaries as extended dreams, and the dreams as miniature diaries. In this article, I engage with both the dreams and diaries (or at least some of them, as the corpus is now very large) to examine the work they do in creating narratives of anger, anxiety, resilience, justice and repair. I also draw on psychoanalytic ideas developed in previous European conflicts – notably those of death drive, melancholia, depressive anxiety and reparation – to examine how these moving and powerful pieces of writing communicate something of the affective reality of war. In those days, days and nights of huge loss, psychoanalysis tried to speak truthfully of people’s suffering; can it be made to do so again today?

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