Psychoanalytic Practices and Russia's War Against Ukraine: Reflections and Clinical Observations

Editor : Mariana Velykodna, Editor : Oksana Yakushko, Editor : Adrienne Harris

Book Details

Publisher : Routledge
Published : April 2026
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 264
Category :
Psychoanalysis
Catalogue No : 98529
ISBN 13 : 9781032660233
ISBN 10 : 1032660236

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This book looks at the impact of multigenerational trauma, severe psychopathology, and ethical struggles through the lens of Ukrainian psychoanalysts working amidst the Russian invasion.

The contribution examines psychoanalytic responses to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, including via lived experiences of Ukrainian psychoanalysts who practice under conditions of continued threat. The book offers analytic observations and exploration of psychoanalytically informed care with Ukrainians who are experiencing profound distress and war trauma. Contributors describe their work with diverse Ukrainian groups, including children and adolescents, war refugees, individuals experiencing severe physical and psychological crises, Ukrainian Jewish community, and Ukrainian diaspora.

This will be a valuable resource for readers interested in understanding and responding to impact of wars, specifically genocidal wars. They are invited to witness the profound challenges, creativity, courage, human and professional dilemmas, and pain that are witnessed and responded to by psychoanalytically informed practitioners.

Reviews & Endorsements
Table of Contents
About the Editor(s)
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Reviews and Endorsements

This book should be required reading for all therapists. Its contributors put words to the unspeakable and bear witness to the unbearable. No human being can fully represent the horrors and continuing psychological depredations of war, and yet these essays manage to capture the precariousness and preciousness of our existence, the power of our feelings about place, and the critical role of our moral center of gravity in the face of evil. With clarity, passion, and brilliance, these authors help us see that although war-adapted psychotherapies can help only in modest ways, they matter profoundly.
Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Visiting Professor Emerita, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology

The urgency of this book, both for those who live under conditions of war and for psychoanalysis itself, cannot be overstated. In this volume’s efforts to un-silence, in real time, the consequences of the ongoing Russian effort to annihilate individuals, culture and country, it is a quintessential antidote to war’s dehumanizing force and demands that we embrace the possibilities inherent in our profession. The valuable opportunity this volume provides melds theory, practice and personal experience to expand our clinical, conceptual and moral capacities to counter the violent occupation that so much of our world is seemingly authorized by fascism’s rise to perpetuate. There is a testimony here to the isomorphic interchange between psychic and large-group catastrophe, but there is also, in this series of essays, much hope and inspiration in the authors’ persistence in speaking psychoanalytically-informed truth, to which it behooves us to listen, despite all.
Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP, Clinical Professor, Northwestern University; Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

1. In the Nets of Trauma. Ukrainian Case.
Natalia Nalyvaiko

2. Phenomenology of Psychic Processes and Relationships in Wartime Ukraine
Valeriy Dorozhkin

3. Oedipal conflicts during wartime: War and the infantile fantasies
Yuliia Vizniuk, Elina Yevlanova

4. “I do (not) want to kill:” Trauma Beyond Words
Olena Medvedieva

5. The mental void: Impact of war on Non-Neurotic Structures
Olga Pavlovska, Nina Kokoilo

6. Psychoanalytic Practice in Wartime Ukraine: Challenges to the Ethics
Oksana Arshevska-Guérin, Natalia Nalyvaiko, Mariana Velykodna

7. Effects and Affects of War in Psychoanalytic Practice
Oleh Khrystenko

8. War-forced terminations of psychoanalysis: cases from Ukraine
Mariana Velykodna

9. Avoiding talking about the war? Features of transference during counseling with Ukrainian refugees
Elina Yevlanova

10. The Crisis of Group Identity during the War: Experience of Working with the Ukrainian Jewish Community
Olena Slobodianiuk, Olena Osypenko

11. The “Severed Roots” People: Psychoanalytic Reflections from Running the Psychological Hotline Work with Ukrainian Refugees
Sergii Ugrium

12. Psychoanalytic therapy with children in the realities of war: an analysis that cannot be
Yelyzaveta Davoian, Daria Kyrylova, Zoia Miroshnyk

13. Wartime Supervision as Psychoanalytical Research of Clinical Cases and Psychic Phenomena
Volodymyr Mamko

14. He. She. War: Transforming War-Related Experience through the Intervision Group Dynamics
Veronika Lukyanova, Ruslana Rudenko

15. International and national psychoanalytic initiatives in wartime Ukraine: history of 2022-2023
Alexander A. Lupis, Marianna Tkalych, Mariana Velykodna

About the Editor(s)

Mariana Velykodna is a EuroPsy-registered psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist certified by the European Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies, an associate professor and Head of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Department at Ukraine Sigmund Freud University in Ukraine.

Oksana Yakushko is a licensed psychologist, psychoanalyst, and Ukrainian immigrant. She is a faculty at the George Washington University and a psychoanalytic practitioner in California and Washington, DC.

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Faculty and Training Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, serves on the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalytic Perspectives and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

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