Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Combat' operates on at least three distinct registers, each generating its own cluster of interpretive positions. At the mythic-cosmological level, combat appears as a founding ontological event: Eliade's treatment of the Babylonian akitu ceremony reads the battle between Marduk and Tiamat as a ritually reactualized cosmogony, the passage from chaos to ordered cosmos mimed annually by human actors. In the Homeric and Hesiodic texts, combat is the primary arena in which heroic identity, divine favor, and the concepts of kudos and kratos are constituted and contested — a domain as much theological as martial. The second register is psychopathological: Judith Herman's foundational clinical work demonstrates that combat exposure produces measurable, graduated neuropsychological damage, with 200–240 days of continuous exposure sufficient to collapse even the most resilient soldier. Herman further tracks the convergence of early-life adversity and heavy combat exposure as the most reliable predictor of chronic PTSD, including persistent suicidality and moral injury from participation in war crimes. A third register is therapeutic and post-traumatic: Shapiro's EMDR research addresses combat veterans as a primary clinical population, while Keltner's awe-science frames combat experience as a site of dark, threat-charged awe — terror and transcendence coexisting — whose sudden absence upon return to civilian life generates a distinctive form of existential hunger. The tensions among these registers — mythic glorification, clinical devastation, and therapeutic redemption — constitute the term's conceptual depth.
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It was recognized for the first time that any man could break down under fire and that psychiatric casualties could be predicted in direct proportion to the severity of combat exposure.
Herman establishes that combat exposure operates as a measurable, cumulative stressor capable of breaking any soldier, shifting the medical understanding of combat neurosis from moral failing to quantifiable physiological threshold.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis
This ritual recitation reactualized the combat between Marduk and the marine monster Tiamat, a combat that took place aborigine and put an end to chaos by the final victory of the god.
Eliade argues that mythic combat between a deity and a chaos-monster is not historical narrative but a cosmogonic template ritually re-enacted to renew cosmic order each year.
Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
Among the men who had experienced both childhood adversity and heavy combat, the great majority still met criteria for the PTSD diagnosis some ten to fifteen years after their return home from Vietnam.
Herman demonstrates that the conjunction of early-life adversity and heavy combat exposure produces the most enduring traumatic sequelae, while committing war crimes emerges as an independent predictor of long-term stress.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis
Popular media have reported, for example, that there were more deaths of Vietnam veterans by suicide after the war than deaths in combat... mortality studies nevertheless suggest that combat trauma may indeed increase the risk of suicide.
Herman evaluates the relationship between combat trauma and post-war suicide, confirming that severe combat exposure is linked to persistent suicidality, unresolved guilt, and chronic post-traumatic symptomatology.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis
He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War — startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints — could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system.
Herman traces Kardiner's foundational claim that combat neurosis is rooted in physioneurosis — a chronic autonomic dysregulation — establishing the somatic substrate for the PTSD framework.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis
It is often a dark, threat-filled awe that can quickly shift to horror at carnage, chaos, violence, perpetrating harm, and watching Jung people die. But there is awe there.
Keltner repositions combat as a site of extreme awe — a dark, morally ambiguous form of transcendence — whose sudden absence upon demobilization leaves veterans with an unmet hunger for intensity and meaning.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis
Part of what alienates Klay's fictional sergeant from civilians is his moral outrage at the lack of shared sacrifice. But in addition, there is another cause for his sense of alienation: he suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder.
Through Phil Klay's fiction, Herman articulates the double alienation of the combat veteran — moral and neurological — as the phenomenological core of the military-to-civilian transition.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
There are two basic concepts that a veteran with PTSD needs to understand. First, if he is as bad as he thinks he is, he would not still be suffering; bad people do not suffer over something they did 20 years ago.
Shapiro outlines the psychoeducational reframing necessary for EMDR work with combat veterans, distinguishing moral injury from culpability as a precondition for therapeutic processing.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
When he is sent as an ambassador to Achilles, Odysseus presses him to return to the combat: 'The Achaeans will honor you like a god. For you will certainly win for them a great kûdos, for this time you will triumph over Hector.'
Benveniste shows that return to combat in the Iliad is structured by the economy of kudos — a divinely conferred glory — making battle the primary social and theological site for the acquisition of honor.
Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
The investigation of veterans from World War II and the Korean War by Eider and Clipp (1989) provides a nice case in point... the 'Pathogenic Legacy' involves the experience of stress-related symptomatology some time after the return to civilian life when circumstances trigger unresolved war-related conflicts.
Pargament situates combat within a coping-resource model, noting that wartime experience generates either resource growth or a pathogenic legacy of unresolved conflict activated by post-war triggers.
Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
Tyrtaeus goes even further (6.1): 'It is a beautiful thing for a brave man to die in the foremost ranks, fighting for his country.' He bestows his praise, not merely on the defence, or on the battle, but on the very death of the hero.
Snell traces the Greek lyric intensification of combat ideology from Homeric defensive valor to Tyrtaeus's aesthetic glorification of death in battle, marking a cultural shift in the psychic meaning of martial sacrifice.
Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
The initial controlled study of 22 rape, molestation, and combat victims compared EMDR and a modified flooding procedure that was used as a placebo to control for exposure to the memory.
Shapiro's foundational EMDR study groups combat victims alongside sexual trauma survivors, establishing combat as one of the primary traumatic categories for which EMDR claims clinical efficacy.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
'in close combat, man to man' (Horn.), 'in close combat' (Tyrt.), 'inco[se combat]'
Beekes's etymological data preserves the Greek lexical distinction between distant and hand-to-hand combat, anchoring the concept of close personal combat in archaic poetic and military usage.
Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside
In raging battle great terror may sometimes assail even the mightiest hero. So it befell the gigantic Ajax. He stood dazed, threw his shield over his shoulders, and crouched backwards step by step.
Otto illustrates how Homeric theology attributes battlefield terror to divine intervention — Zeus striking fear into Ajax — framing combat psychology as a domain of divine agency rather than purely human response.