Abstract
This paper develops a psychoanalytic field account of moral injury in dementia caregiving, understood as a disturbance of moral self-recognition arising through the erosion of relational conditions that render moral experience recognisable, thinkable and inhabitable. Using a conceptual-clinical reanalysis of two published case examples, it examines how reciprocity, recognisability and symbolic containment may weaken as relational and institutional fields change, leaving carers struggling to sustain a morally viable sense of themselves as caring and responsible subjects. Drawing on post-Bionian field theory, the paper foregrounds the ego ideal as a field-supported orientation through which carers sustain an image of themselves as loving, responsible and morally viable subjects. When this image loses relational support, ordinary limits and ambivalence may be experienced as signs of moral failure. Moral injury is therefore approached not primarily as the consequence of discrete ethical transgressions, but as a disturbance in the field conditions that sustain moral self-recognition.