Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning after Terror Paperback by Julia Lieblich (Author), Esad Boskailo (Vanderbilt University Press)

This book, along with Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", should be a mandatory textbook for all humanities and social studies undergraduate programs around the world. With courage and frankness, Lieblich and Boskailo call things by their true names, be it the UN, EU and US failures in Bosnia, the genocide and the atrocities that were committed there, or the personal losses and responsibilities of the individual. Highly competent in their respective fields of journalism and psychiatry, they do not shy away from difficult questions of political, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual nature. These 170 pages are packed with value, providing clarity and eloquence and making this book sufficient by itself for the reader who does not have much background information about the events and ideas in the book. Grounded in the grim realities of the Bosnian genocide in the last decade of the 20th Century, it draws from the best and brightest experts and humanists in diverse fields to keep the reader well informed about every aspect of the book--Viktor Frankl in psychiatry, Noel Malcolm in history, Roy Gutman in journalism, Eric Stover in human rights, Frank Ochberg in trauma work, and many others.

The first part of the book leads us through Dr. Boskailo's experience of the Bosnian war, the ordeal of the concentration camps, his healing and defiant triumph. This defiant triumph of the human spirit is very characteristic of Bosnia itself, best expressed by the famous Bosnian proverb putting a limit to human irresponsibility: You can do whatever you want, but not as long as you want to. The second part is about Boskailo's approach to psychotherapy, grief and loss work, and "integration" as he calls it. It is a much necessary reminder for all in the helping professions that success in treatment is not just decrease of symptoms, but restoring the individual to a state of mind that is closest to the one before the trauma, with the trauma "integrated" into the person's life. This conceptualization reminds me of the great American thinker and scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, who said that the dragon you swallow gives you its power. This book leads me to conclude that just as the individual heals and integrates by restoration to a state before the trauma, the same must be true for communities and countries. This is not only a roadmap to the individual's integration, but also to Bosnia's integration, which still suffers under apartheid and ethnic divisions. Also, the need to come to terms with one's losses applies to institutions too--the UN and EU in particular lost their moral compass in Bosnia. The crisis in the EU did not start in Greece, but in Bosnia, with the betrayal of "Never Again."