Haaken is both a psychoanalyst and a documentary filmmaker, and, in both roles, her penchant for storytelling is key […] PTSD is, paradoxically, at once progressive and regressive… It opens up the possibility that human suffering and even mental illness are sociopolitical problems in which symptoms are expressed by oppressed and exploited individuals […] It could become transgressive or even subversive as it holds societal problems and human evil responsible for much, if not all, of human suffering […] At a political moment such as the one we are living now… it is imperative that we, as clinicians, consider the intersection of race and military service as well […] We, as readers and clinicians, are left asking ourselves how we should tailor our interventions so that we at once address and ameliorate individual suffering and take a role in facilitating large-scale social change.

Wendy Winograd, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Nationally Certified Psychoanalyst
Psychoanalytic Social Work from Taylor & Francis

Jan Haaken is one of feminist critical psychology’s most powerful voices. Here again, as in all her books and films, we discover that Haaken, a consummate story-teller, is also a consummate listener. The stories she tells here, drawn from her documentary film work and her clinical experience, reveal over and over the complexities of what it means to suffer and what it means to be human—complexities that defy any simple diagnosis. Haaken’s capacity to hear in these stories what has too often been unheard illuminates for clinicians, activists, and social theorists alike the regressive and progressive socio-political uses– over its long history–of the PTSD diagnosis.

Lynne Layton, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology Dept. of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable author: psychoanalytic therapist, professor, scholar, and documentary filmmaker embedded in a Combat Stress Control unit in Afghanistan. No other book brings this wide-ranging and up-close access to the politics and experience of PTSD. No other book combines scholarship with experience in this way. A remarkable achievement.

Fred Alford, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park

This book is essential reading. It’s a superb, scholarly, timely and inspiring work that brings together a lifetime’s critical analysis of psychiatry and the politics of posttraumatic stress disorder, using biographical, filmic, visual, participatory and field-based research. Important lines of analyses include the societal aspects of mental suffering, moral discourse on criminality, and the use of personality disorder and PTSD diagnoses as they underpin the social project of psychiatry. This book will be on my core reading lists for sociology, women’s studies, critical and cultural criminology.

Maggie O’Neill, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology and Criminology,
University College Cork

This pathbreaking and invaluable book breaks down psychiatric conceptions of PTSD, reconstructing the history of the diagnostic category through a critical feminist psychoanalytic lens, and documents its functions in military contexts. Haaken’s historical analysis and critique artfully bridge the worlds of theory and a range of practices, from clinical settings, war zones, the courts, crisis work, to political activism.

Ian Parker, Ph.D.
Practicing psychoanalyst, secretary
Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix

With her characteristically lucid prose and critical intellectual gifts, Haaken interprets PTSD through the lenses of politics, history, and feminist psychoanalysis. She sheds light on how PTSD has emerged and grown powerful as a diagnosis and how it serves not only to help patients but also to protect clinicians and limit their understandings of how and why patients suffer. Importantly, she accomplishes this with compassion, fairness, and clinical acumen; she sees many sides of the same problem and never loses sight of the people who suffer and those who are tasked with attenuating that suffering… Breaking Down is a book to be savored both by psy practitioners and general intellectual audiences throughout the world.

Philip Cushman, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Antioch University Seattle

A former student asked me to zoom in on a class on culture and psychology. In his syllabus there was Jan Haaken’s (1998) Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. Having taught a seminar where years before he had studied that book, it was a much-deserved tribute to Haaken’s nuanced narratives of social psychological phenomenon and their intertwining. Certainly, her work is not in the vein of écriture feminine nor in the forced (if sometimes humorous) efforts of Slavoj Žižek to modify university discourse. Haaken does this subversion [JM1] with ease and grace, like a beautifully written case study with satirical and political bite. Haaken crafts modes of expression that should especially merit the attention of feminist psychologists[JM2] who must contest the American Psychological Association’s stylistic constraints- which occasionally beset Haaken’s latest book. Still, the overall result of her text in both style and content and should generate more radical reflections on how we write what we write about.

Kareen Malone
Professor of Psychology
University of West Georgia