Soul wound
A spiritual name for the lasting damage that war or atrocity can do to a person. It describes the same harm that clinicians treat as a psychological wound, but locates it in the soul and holds that healing needs communal, ritual, and religious practice rather than therapy alone. The disagreement with the clinical view is about what kind of thing the injury is, and so about what could ever repair it.
The theological and pastoral counterpart to moral injury — the language used by Edward Tick, Rita Nakashima Brock, Gabriella Lettini and the chaplaincy literature for the same phenomenon the clinical literature calls moral injury, when the emphasis is on the spiritual rather than the psychological dimension.
Etymology§
Tick's use of soul wound in War and the Soul (Quest, 2005) draws explicitly on Native American, Vietnamese, and ancient Greek vocabularies for war's damage to the person — none of which Tick treats as metaphor. Soul repair — the matching reparative term — was given its institutional form by Brock and Lettini's 2012 Beacon Press book and the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School (TCU) established the same year.
Soul wound is the theological vocabulary that the moral-injury literature partly displaced and partly carries along. The relationship to the clinical moral injury is not simple substitution: clinicians and chaplains often treat the same patient and use both vocabularies in tandem, and there is sustained crossover work — Brock has been a trainer for VA chaplains, Tick has trained DoD personnel, Kinghorn holds joint appointments in psychiatry and divinity.
The substantive disagreement between the soul wound / soul repair register and the clinical-moral-injury register is about what kind of thing the injury is and therefore what kind of practice can repair it. The soul- wound register holds that the damage is to a faculty that is not finally psychological at all and that repair requires communal, ritual, and religious practices that the clinic cannot supply. The clinical register holds that those practices may be helpful but are adjunctive to manualised treatment. The two camps tend to share patients and disagree quietly rather than loudly.