I Had a Mummy Too: War Traumas: A Psychoanalytic Experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina

" ……But a grenade blew her to bits. I also had a brother. But a grenade blew off his leg. I wonder if one day my daddy will appear. What's the point of a dream. If it doesn't come true?" --- The above poem was written by a Bosnian child to her mother. The child could have been Afghani, Israeli, Palestinian, or Iraqi, because war injuries of the body and soul know no boundaries. In 1994, the war was in Bosnia, and this book is an account of how psychotherapists from Bosnia and Italy struggled with the psychological trauma in women who had suffered rape, torture, death of husbands and children, and loss of cultural identity. The text describes six years of clinical work and training by a small innovative group of psychotherapists who worked through cases of individual and collective suffering. The authors describe the growth and development of their multidisciplinary intercultural group as it lived and worked in the extreme and unfamiliar environment of collapsing social and civil life while under intense pressure to provide therapeutic aid.