Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper introduces a set of essays about “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” a paper written in 1989 by Chaim Shatan. A Vietnam-era psychoanalyst, Shatan was a clinician, a scholar, and an activist whose role was pivotal in the psychiatric recognition of posttraumatic stress disorder, which was published in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), in 1980. Despite his contribution to the field, Shatan’s theory of war trauma has remained overlooked in psychoanalysis. Here I rescue this forgotten figure, underscore some of his main ideas, and explore the reasons why “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was included in this volume. An opening for the discussion that follows, this introduction posits that Shatan’s psychoanalytic framework for war trauma is contemporarily relevant.
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