On an Apparently Absurd Situation:
The Therapist Under Bombardment and the Iranian Far from Iran
Dr. Amir Hossein Jalali Nadoushan
In the present conditions of Iran, the question “What importance do my problems have?” goes beyond a merely personal concern. It signals a situation in which personal suffering is diminished under the shadow of collective suffering: war, insecurity, the collapse of trust, disorder, economic anxiety, and national exhaustion.
We say to ourselves: when the city is under threat, when the sound of explosions and the news of death, conflict, and collapse have become part of everyday life, when families are worried about safety, bread, the future, and survival, what importance can my sadness, my anxiety, my broken relationship, my exhausted body, or my sense of meaninglessness possibly have?
But the more difficult question is this: how is psychotherapy even possible in such a situation? Is therapy—especially when conducted from an Iran under bombardment, amid war, threat, internet disruptions, and insecurity—not an absurd act? Is sitting in a therapy session, while outside the therapy room reality is collapsing with full violence, not a kind of denial?
This larger question has no simple or straightforward answer. Yes, at first glance, psychotherapy in wartime may appear absurd. Two people speak about dreams, anxiety, relationships, grief, anger, shame, or guilt, while outside that room—or behind the same online screen—the formerly secure world has collapsed. This scene does, in fact, reflect part of the absurdity of our time. The therapist, too, is not detached from reality. The therapist may have heard the same sounds, followed the same news, and carried the same worries about family, children, the hospital, the streets, and the future.
But absurdity does not always mean meaninglessness. Sometimes it is precisely in the heart of the absurd that human beings are forced to construct a minimal and more humane form of meaning.
The therapist in wartime is not supposed to pretend that the world is safe. Nor is the therapist meant to embellish the reality of bombardment, instability, or fear with a few relaxation techniques. Psychotherapy in such a situation, if it is honest, begins from the very first moment with this sentence: “We are sitting in an unsafe world, and yet we are trying not to surrender completely to insecurity.”
From this perspective, a therapy session in wartime is neither simple nor routine. It is an act performed on a knife-edge: a line between complete collapse and the preservation of a minimum degree of psychic continuity. When most things appear threatening and unpredictable, the continuity of a therapeutic relationship can tell the patient: something still remains of the previous order—of language, time, and relationship. In wartime, this message is not insignificant.
Of course, this approach is valid only if the therapist does not fall into the illusion of omnipotence. Psychotherapy under bombardment is not ordinary psychotherapy with a wartime backdrop. Nor is its aim necessarily deep analysis, ambitious exploration, or complex interpretations. In such conditions, therapy must become humbler, more grounded, and more proportionate. Its main task may be to preserve contact with reality, reduce psychological isolation, help with emotional regulation, make fear more tolerable, allow mourning, prevent impulsive decisions, and maintain a minimal connection with life.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, war should not be seen merely as an external event. War penetrates the internal organization of the psyche and blurs the boundary between outside and inside. External threat awakens internal threats: primitive anxieties, feelings of helplessness, raw anger, survivor guilt, a sense of abandonment, and sometimes an intense need to cling to a safe object.
In such a situation, the therapist cannot simply play the role of a neutral and distant observer. Yet the therapist must also be careful not to turn the therapeutic relationship into a container for discharging their own personal anxiety. The difficulty lies precisely here: the therapist must remain human and present, while still preserving the therapeutic position.
In today’s Iran, this difficulty is doubled, because the current crisis is not only bombardment or war. We are facing denser layers of erosion: the erosion of public trust, economic exhaustion, generational rupture, repeated migrations, symbolic violence, insecurity about the future, and the chronic experience of not being heard. Therefore, the patient is not speaking merely about “one incident”; they are speaking about living in a world that has long since lost its predictability and its capacity to provide support.
In such a situation, the therapist must know that sometimes the patient’s question is not “How can I reduce my anxiety?” but rather “Is it still possible to remain human?” Here, more than promising calm, the therapist must keep alive the capacity to think. War pushes the psyche toward raw reactions: the urge to attack, flee, become numb, hate, split, idealize heroes, and create enemies. Therapeutic work, even in a small measure, can be a form of resistance against precisely this regression in psychic functioning.
