Even the field of psychology seems to be ill prepared to address the guilt caused by war and the attendant moral issues. Peter Marin condemns the “inadequacy” of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the “pain of human conscience.” As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt. Instead it is treated as a neurosis or a pathology, “something to escape rather than something to learn from, a disease rather than—as it may well be for the vets—an appropriate if painful response to the past.”
