U3 - American Wars and Moral Injury

American Wars and Moral Injury

Course Description

This course examines how war inflicts wounds not merely on bodies but on the very foundations of our capacity to make meaning. Moral injury is understood here through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Jared Russell, particularly in relation to the breakdown of symbolic mediation. Rather than focusing on moral injury as a mere crisis of conscience ("I've done something bad"), this course will explore how war disrupts the subject’s capacity to orient themselves within the symbolic order.

By analyzing major American conflicts—from the French and Indian War to contemporary engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan—students will explore how historical, cultural, and literary portrayals of war reveal the fractures war inflicts upon the structures of meaning that constitute the subject’s moral and existential world.

Readings will include seminal literary texts, soldiers’ personal accounts, and selected psychoanalytic and philosophical essays. Students will trace the evolution of warfare in American history, examine how moral and ethical expectations shift across different cultural contexts, and investigate how participants and witnesses endure and interpret experiences that fracture their established sense of meaning and symbolic coherence.

Course Objectives

1. Conceptualizing Moral Injury: Develop an understanding of moral injury informed by Lacanian theory and Jared Russell’s work on sublimation and the superego, emphasizing how war destabilizes symbolic mediation.

2. Historical Analysis: Examine major American wars and the evolving moral frameworks that shaped them, investigating how each conflict’s unique social, political, and technological conditions contributed to distinct forms of moral injury.

3. Literary and Cultural Representation: Analyze novels, poetry, and personal narratives that depict moral injury, evaluating how authors convey—or conceal—the moral and existential rupture war can impose.

4. Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Engagement: Apply psychoanalytic theories of the superego, the real, and symbolic failure to war narratives, with particular attention to how individuals and societies struggle to integrate experiences of war into their symbolic reality.

5. Scholarly and Reflective Inquiry: Develop written arguments linking historical context, literary expression, and psychoanalytic theory, highlighting the role of war in shaping (and shattering) the American cultural unconscious.

Required Texts & Materials

Psychoanalytic & Philosophical Foundations:

• Jared Russell, Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction (selected readings)

• Your blog post: “Moral Injury and the Failure of Symbolic Mediation: Lacan, Jared Russell, and the Ethics of Care”

• Selections from The Undecidable Unconscious on the ethics of care and moral injury

• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (excerpts)

• Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (selected seminars)

Historical & Literary Readings:

• French and Indian War / Revolutionary War:

  • James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

  • Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (selected)

  • Poetry: Philip Freneau, “To the Memory of the Brave Americans”

• Civil War:

  • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

  • Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (selected poems)

  • Civil War letters and diaries (selected)

• World War I:

  • E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

  • Poetry: Alan Seeger, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”

  • Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (as a comparative text)

• World War II:

  • Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  • Poetry: Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

• Vietnam War:

  • Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

  • Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (selected poems)

• Iraq & Afghanistan Wars:

  • Phil Klay, Redeployment (selected stories)

  • Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

  • Poetry: Brian Turner, Here, Bullet (selected poems)

  • David Finkel, The Good Soldiers (selected excerpts)

Course Schedule (14-Week Overview)

Weeks 1-2: Introduction to Moral Injury and the Symbolic Order

• Reading: Your blog post on moral injury and symbolic mediation; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

• Discussion: The role of the superego, symbolic failure, and existential rupture in war

Weeks 3-5: Early American Conflicts & the Symbolic Foundations of Moral Injury

• Reading: The Last of the Mohicans, soldier diaries, Paine’s The American Crisis

• Discussion: How early American wars shaped national identity and moral narratives

Weeks 6-7: The Civil War & the Fracture of National Meaning

• Reading: The Red Badge of Courage, Whitman’s Drum-Taps

• Discussion: Ideological conflict, individual trauma, and the instability of meaning in civil war

Weeks 8-9: World Wars & the Industrialization of Moral Injury

• Reading: The Enormous Room, Catch-22, selected war poetry

• Discussion: Bureaucracy, absurdity, and the collapse of traditional moral frameworks in industrialized warfare

Weeks 10-11: Vietnam War & the Fragmentation of Narrative Truth

• Reading: The Things They Carried, Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau

• Discussion: Memory, storytelling, and the loss of symbolic coherence in war narratives

Weeks 12-13: Contemporary Wars & the Ethics of Care

• Reading: Redeployment, The Yellow Birds, your writings on moral injury and care ethics

• Discussion: How moral injury manifests in post-9/11 conflicts and what an ethics of care offers as a response

Week 14: Course Synthesis & Final Reflections

• Reading: Brock & Lettini, Soul Repair (excerpts)

• Discussion: How societies construct—or fail to construct—meaning after war

Major Assignments

1. Weekly Reflections (20%) – Short analyses connecting readings to the broader psychoanalytic framework of moral injury.

2. Midterm Paper (20%) – A 5–7 page paper examining moral injury in an early American conflict through the lens of Lacanian theory and the failure of symbolic mediation.

3. Creative Component (15%) – A short story, dialogue, or analytical blog post illustrating how war threatens symbolic orientation.

4. Class Presentation (15%) – Analysis of a theoretical perspective (e.g., Lacan, Russell) in dialogue with a literary text.

5. Final Paper (30%) – A 10–12 page comparative essay on how two or more wars reveal moral injury as a crisis of symbolic mediation.

Concluding Note

This course situates moral injury within the broader psychoanalytic framework of symbolic failure, superego demands, and the real. By exploring war’s impact on meaning-making, students will gain insight into how individuals and societies negotiate the trauma of war and how the American cultural unconscious has evolved in response to its violent history. Ultimately, this course seeks to illuminate not only the wounds inflicted by war but the possibilities—and limits—of healing through symbolic reconstruction and ethical engagement.