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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #55443 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55443)
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, by
-Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel and Ernest Jones and Sigmund Freud
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
-
-Author: Sándor Ferenczi
- Karl Abraham
- Ernst Simmel
- Ernest Jones
- Sigmund Freud
-
-Release Date: August 27, 2017 [EBook #55443]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND WAR NEUROSES ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
- ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
- Transcriber’s Note:
-
- The name Freund at page 8, which is likely to be a reference to Freud,
- has been corrected accordingly.
-
- The erroneous Roman number vli in footnote 15 is corrected to be vii
- just as a guess.
- ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
-
-
- THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL LIBRARY
-
- EDITED BY ERNEST JONES
-
- NO. 2
-
-
-
-
- PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
-
- AND THE
-
- WAR NEUROSES
-
- by
-
- Drs. S. FERENCZI (Budapest), KARL ABRAHAM (Berlin),
- ERNST SIMMEL (Berlin) and ERNEST JONES (London)
-
- Introduction by
- Prof. SIGM. FREUD (Vienna)
-
- [Illustration]
-
- THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL PRESS
- LONDON VIENNA NEW YORK
-
- 1921
-
- Copyright, 1921
-
- C. Fromme, Printer, Vienna
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
- PAGE
-
- I. Introduction by Prof. Sigm. Freud 1
-
- II. Symposium held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical
- Congress at Budapest, September 1918:
-
- 1. Dr. S. Ferenczi 5
-
- 2. Dr. Karl Abraham 22
-
- 3. Dr. Ernst Simmel 30
-
- III. War Shock and Freud’s Theory of the Neuroses, by Dr.
- Ernest Jones 44
-
-
-
-
-I.
-
-INTRODUCTION
-
-BY PROFESSOR SIGM. FREUD, Vienna.
-
-
-This little book on the War Neuroses, with which the Verlag opens the
-“Internationale psychoanalytische Bibliothek”, deals with a subject
-which until lately engaged the greatest current interest. When the
-subject came up for discussion at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress
-at Budapest (September, 1918), official representatives of the Central
-European Powers were present to obtain information from the lectures
-and discussions. The hopeful result of this first meeting was the
-promise that psycho-analytical institutions should be established,
-where medical men qualified in analysis might find the means and time
-to study the nature of these puzzling illnesses and the therapeutic
-value of psycho-analysis in them. However, before these results could
-be achieved the war came to an end, the government organisations broke
-down, and interest in war neuroses gave place to other concerns. At
-the same time, significantly enough, most of the neurotic diseases
-which had been brought about by the war disappeared on the cessation
-of the war conditions. The opportunity, therefore, for a thorough
-investigation of these affections was unfortunately missed. However,
-one must add, it is to be hoped that it will be a very long time
-before such an opportunity again occurs. This episode, now a thing
-of the past, has not been without importance for the spread of the
-knowledge of psycho-analysis. Many medical men, who had previously held
-themselves aloof from psycho-analysis, have been brought into close
-touch with its theories through their service with the army compelling
-them to deal with the question of the war neuroses. The reader can
-easily gather from Ferenczi’s contribution to the subject with what
-hesitation and misgivings this advance was made. Some of the factors,
-such as the psycho-genetic origin of the symptoms, the significance
-of unconscious impulses, and the part that the primary advantage of
-being ill plays in the adjusting psychical conflicts (“flight into
-disease”), all of which had long before been discovered and described
-as operating in the neuroses of peace time, were found also in the
-war neuroses and almost generally accepted. The work of E. Simmel has
-shown what results may be obtained if the war neurotic is treated by
-the cathartic method, which, as is well known, was the first stage of
-the psycho-analytic technique.
-
-From the advance thus made towards psycho-analysis, however, one
-need not assume that the opposition to it has been reconciled or
-neutralised. One might think that when a man, who had hitherto not
-accepted any of a number of connected conclusions, suddenly finds
-himself in the position of being convinced of the truth of a part
-of them, he would weaken in his opposition and adopt an attitude of
-respectful attention, lest the other part, of which he has no personal
-experience, and therefore upon which he is unable to form a personal
-opinion, should also prove to be correct.
-
-This other part of the psycho-analytical theory which is not touched
-upon in the study of the war neuroses is that the driving forces which
-find expression in the formation of symptoms are sexual in nature, and
-that the neurosis is the result of the conflict between the ego and the
-sexual impulses which it has repudiated. The term “sexuality” is to be
-taken here in the broader sense customary in psycho-analysis, and not
-to be confused with the narrower sense of “genitality”. Now it is quite
-correct, as Ernest Jones points out in his contribution, that this part
-of the theory has not hitherto been demonstrated in relation to the
-war neuroses. The work which could prove this part has not yet been
-carried out. It may be that the war neuroses are unsuitable material
-for this proof. However, the opponents of psycho-analysis, whose
-repugnance to sexuality has shown itself to be stronger than their
-logic, have hastened to proclaim that investigation of the war neuroses
-has finally disproved this part of the psycho-analytical theory. In
-this pronouncement they have been guilty of a slight confusion. If
-the—up to the present superficial—investigation of war neuroses has not
-shown that the sexual theory of the neuroses is correct, that is quite
-another matter from showing that this theory is incorrect.
-
-With an impartial attitude and some willingness it should not be
-difficult to find the way to further elucidation.
-
-The war neuroses, in so far as they differ from the ordinary neuroses
-of peace time through particular peculiarities, are to be regarded
-as traumatic neuroses, whose existence has been rendered possible or
-promoted through an ego-conflict. In Abraham’s contribution there
-are plain indications of this ego-conflict; the English and American
-authors whom Jones quotes have also recognised it. The conflict takes
-place between the old ego of peace time and the new war-ego of the
-soldier, and it becomes acute as soon as the peace-ego is faced with
-the danger of being killed through the risky undertakings of his newly
-formed parasitical double. Or one might put it, the old ego protects
-itself from the danger to life by flight into the traumatic neurosis in
-defending itself against the new ego which it recognises as threatening
-its life. The National Army was therefore the condition, and fruitful
-soil, for the appearance of war neuroses; they could not occur in
-professional soldiers, or mercenaries.
-
-The other feature of the war neurosis is that it is a traumatic
-neurosis, such as is well known to occur in peace time after fright or
-severe accidents, without any reference to an ego-conflict.
-
-The theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses, or as we prefer to
-call it, the sexual hunger (libido) theory, was originally put forward
-only as regards the transference neuroses of peace conditions, and can
-be easily demonstrated in them by using the analytic technique. But
-its application to those other affections, which more recently we have
-grouped together as the narcissistic neuroses, meets with difficulties.
-Ordinary cases of Dementia praecox, Paranoia and Melancholia are
-fundamentally very unsuitable material for the proof of the sexual
-hunger (libido) theory and for reaching an understanding of it, for
-which reason psychiatrists, who neglect the transference neuroses
-cannot be reconciled to it. The traumatic neuroses (of peace time) have
-always been reckoned to be the most refractory in this respect, so that
-the appearance of the war neuroses does not add any fresh factor to the
-former situation.
-
-Only by advancing and making use of the idea of a “narcissistic sexual
-hunger (libido)”, that is to say, a mass of sexual energy that attaches
-itself to the ego and satisfies itself with this as otherwise it
-does only with an object, has it been possible to extend the sexual
-hunger (libido) theory to the narcissistic neuroses, and this entirely
-legitimate development of the concept of sexuality bids fair to do for
-these severer neuroses and for the psychoses all that one can expect
-from an empirically and tentatively progressing theory. The traumatic
-neurosis of peace time will also fit into this group when researches
-into the correlation undoubtedly subsisting between shock, anxiety, and
-narcissistic sexual hunger (libido) have reached success.
-
-If the traumatic and war neuroses emphasise the influence of the danger
-to life and not at all, or not clearly enough, that of the “denial of
-love”, on the other hand the aetiological claim of the former factor
-appearing there so powerfully, is lacking in the usual transference
-neuroses of peace time. Indeed it is vulgarly supposed that these
-latter sufferings are only promoted by indulgence, high-living and
-ease, which provide an interesting contrast to the conditions of life
-under which the war neuroses break out. If psycho-analysts, who find
-their patients have become ill through the “denial of love”, through
-the ungratified demands of the sexual hunger (libido), were to follow
-the example of their opponents, they would maintain that either there
-are no danger neuroses, or that the affections following on terror
-are not neuroses. This has naturally never crossed their minds. On
-the contrary, they see the convenient possibility of combining in one
-conception the two apparently divergent sets of facts. In the traumatic
-and war neuroses the ego of the individual protects itself from a
-danger that either threatens it from without, or is embodied in a form
-of the ego itself, in the transference neuroses of peace time the ego
-regards its own sexual hunger (libido) as a foe, the demands of which
-appear threatening to it. In both cases the ego fears an injury; in
-the one case through the sexual hunger (libido) and in the other from
-outside forces. One might even say that in the case of the war neuroses
-the thing feared, is after all an inner foe, in distinction from the
-pure traumatic neuroses and approximating to the transference neuroses.
-The theoretical difficulties which stand in the way of such a unifying
-conception do not appear to be insurmountable; one can with full right
-designate the repression which underlies every neurosis, as a reaction
-to a trauma, as an elementary traumatic neurosis.
-
-Spring 1919.
-
-
-
-
-II.
-
-SYMPOSIUM
-
-HELD AT THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL CONGRESS BUDAPEST,
-SEPTEMBER 1918
-
-1. DR. S. FERENCZI, Budapest.
-
-
- _Ladies and Gentlemen_,
-
-With your permission I will commence my exposition of the very serious
-and important subject that is the theme of my lecture to-day with
-the recital of a little story which will lead us straightway into
-the revolutionising events of this war. A Hungarian, who had the
-opportunity of observing at close quarters a part of the revolutionary
-upheaval in Russia, told me that the new revolutionary rulers of a
-Russian town found with consternation that the change from the old to
-the new regime had not taken place as rapidly as it should have done
-according to their doctrinal calculations. According to the teachings
-of the materialistic idea of history they could have set up the new
-social order immediately after they had got the entire power into their
-hands. Instead of this, irresponsible elements, which were antagonistic
-to any new order of things, obtained the upper hand, so that the power
-gradually slipped from the hands of the originators of the revolution.
-Then the leaders of the movement put their heads together in order to
-find out what had gone wrong in their calculations. Finally they agreed
-that perhaps the materialistic idea was after all too one-sided, as it
-only took into consideration the economic and commercial relations,
-and had forgotten to take into account one small matter, the feelings
-and thoughts of man, in a word, the psyche. They were sufficiently
-consistent to send emissaries immediately to German speaking countries,
-in order to obtain psychological works, so that they might get at least
-subsequently some knowledge of this neglected science. Many thousands
-of human lives fell victims, perhaps to no purpose, to this omission
-of the revolutionaries; the failure of their efforts resulted in their
-making one discovery however, namely, that of the mind.
-
-A somewhat similar thing has occurred among neurologists during
-the war. The war has produced an enormous number of nervous
-disorders which call for elucidation and cure; however, the
-familiar organic-mechanistic explanation hitherto adopted—which
-in some way corresponds to the materialistic idea of history in
-sociology—completely failed. The mass-experiment of the war has
-produced various severe neuroses, including those in which there could
-be no question of a mechanical influence, and the neurologists have
-likewise been forced to recognise that something was missing in their
-calculations, and this something was again—the psyche.
-
-To some extent we can forgive sociology for this omission; indeed
-the estimation of mental elements in the science of society has
-hitherto been in fact a very trifling one. However, we cannot spare
-neurologists the reproach of having so long disregarded the pioneer
-researches of Breuer and Freud concerning the psychical determination
-of many nervous disturbances, and of having required the terrible
-experiences of the war to set them right in this respect. And yet a
-science—psycho-analysis—has existed for more than twenty years to which
-many investigators had devoted the whole of their efforts, and which
-had helped us to unexpected and important knowledge of the mechanisms
-of mental life and its disturbances.
-
-In my lecture today I shall confine myself to demonstrating the
-introduction of psycho-analysis into modern neurology, an introduction
-which has been effected to some small extent openly, but for the
-most part with hesitation and under false colours, and I will
-briefly communicate the theoretical principles upon which rest the
-psycho-analytical conceptions of the “traumatic neuroses” which have
-been observed during the war[1].
-
-Soon after the outbreak of the war there flamed up again the great
-controversy, which had been carried on for more than ten years,
-concerning the nature of the traumatic neuroses which Oppenheim had in
-his time placed in a class by themselves. Oppenheim hastened to make
-use of the experiences of the war, which exposed so many thousands of
-men to sudden shocks, as supporting his old views, according to which
-the phenomena of these neuroses always came about, as the result of
-physical alterations in the nervous centres, (or in the peripheral
-nerves which secondarily affect those of the centre). The nature of
-the shock itself and its influence upon the method of functioning
-he described in very general, one might even say, phantastic terms.
-Links were “cut out” from the chain of the innervation mechanism,
-most delicate elements “displaced”, paths “blocked”, connections torn
-asunder, obstacles to conduction created, etc. With these and similar
-comparisons, from which, however, all basis in fact was tacking,
-Oppenheim sketched an impressive picture of the material correlation of
-the traumatic neuroses.
-
-The alterations in structure which would take place in the brain
-through the trauma Oppenheim conceived as a delicate physical process
-similar to that which occurs in the iron filing when it comes into
-contact with the magnet.
-
-The sarcastic Gaupp designates such specious physical and physiological
-speculations as brain mythology and molecular mythology. But in our
-opinion he does mythology an injustice.
-
-The material brought forward by Oppenheim to support his views was
-in no way suited to uphold his abstruse theories. To be sure, he
-described with his usual precision characteristic symptoms, which this
-war has produced in deplorable numbers, and also gave to them somewhat
-high-sounding names (Akinesia amnestica, Myotonoklonia trepidans) that
-said nothing as to their nature; these descriptions, however, are not
-especially convincing with reference to his theoretical conceptions[2].
-
-There were, it is true, many who agreed with Oppenheim’s views, though
-for the most part with limitations. Goldscheider holds that the cause
-of these nervous symptoms is partly physical and partly psychical;
-Cassierer, Schuster and Birnbaum are of the same opinion. Wollenberg’s
-question, as to whether the war neuroses were caused through emotion
-or shock, Aschaffenburg answered by stating that there was here
-concerned the joint effect of emotion and concussion. As one of the few
-who obstinately persisted in maintaining the mechanistic idea I will
-mention Lilienstein, who categorically demanded that the word and the
-concept of “mind”, also that of “functional” and “psychic”, and more
-especially that of “psycho-genesis” should be struck out of the medical
-terminology; he maintained that this would simplify the conflict
-and facilitate the investigation, treatment and examination of the
-casualties; the progressive anatomical technique would certainly sooner
-or later discover the material foundations of the neuroses.
-
-We must here refer to the train of thought pursued by V. Sarbó,
-who seeks for the cause of the war neuroses in the microscopical
-destruction of tissue and hemorrhages in the central organ of the
-nervous system; these, he says, originate through direct concussion,
-sudden pressure of the cerebro-spinal fluid, compression of the spinal
-cord in the foramen magnum, etc. V. Sarbó’s theory is only supported
-by a few authors. In this connection I might mention Sachs and Freud,
-who consider that the shock puts the nerve cells into a condition
-of heightened excitability and exhaustability, which is then the
-immediate cause of the neuroses. Finally, Bauer and Fauser look upon
-the traumatic neuroses as the nervous results of disturbances of the
-endocrine glands produced by the shock, and as similar therefore to the
-post-traumatic Basedow’s disease.
-
-Strümpell was one of the first to oppose the purely organic-mechanistic
-idea of the war neuroses. He had, moreover, for some time previously
-referred to certain psychical factors in the causation of the traumatic
-neuroses. He made the accurate observation that in railway accidents,
-etc., those who suffered from a severe neurosis were for the most
-part those who had an _interest_ in being able to prove an injury as
-caused by the trauma: for example, persons who were insured against
-accidents and wished to obtain a large sum of money, or those who
-instituted proceedings against the railway company for compensation
-for injury. Similar or much more severe shocks have, however, no
-lasting nervous results if the accident happens during sport through
-one’s own carelessness, especially under circumstances that exclude
-the hope of compensation for injury as those mentioned, so that the
-patient has no interest in remaining ill, but every interest in the
-speediest recovery. Strümpell asserts that the shock neuroses always
-develop secondarily and purely psycho-genetically as the result of
-desire of gain; he gave medical men the well-meant advice not to
-take seriously the complaints of these patients, like Oppenheim,
-but to bring them back as soon as possible to life and work through
-the smallest allowance or through withdrawal of their pension. The
-representations of Strümpell created a great impression in the medical
-world even in peace time; they led to the idea of the “compensation
-hysteria”; the sufferers, however, were treated not much better than
-if they were malingerers. Strümpell now suggests that the war neuroses
-are also neuroses of covetousness, which serve the patients’ purpose in
-getting free from the military authorities with the highest possible
-pension. Accordingly he demands a strict examination and expert opinion
-of the neuroses occurring in military persons. The content of the
-pathogenic ideas is always a wish—the wish for material compensation,
-for remaining far from infections and danger—and this wish acts
-along auto-suggestive paths in fixing more firmly the symptoms, the
-persistence of morbid sensations and of innervation disturbances of
-motility.
-
-Much of the foregoing train of thought of Strümpell sounds to the
-analyst very probable. For he knows from his analytical experience that
-neurotic symptoms in general represent wish fulfilments, and also the
-fixation of unpleasant mental impressions and their pathogenic state
-is familiar to him. Still he has to reproach the one-sidedness of
-Strümpell’s train of thought: for instance, in the undue prominence of
-the cognitive aspect of the pathogenic experience and the neglect of
-its affective side, as well as the complete ignoring of the unconscious
-psychical processes, with which already Kurt Singer, Schuster and
-Gaupp had reproached him. Strümpell also has a presentiment that these
-neurotic forms of illness can only be explained by means of a psychical
-investigation; he does not, however, tell us his method of work with
-reference to this. Probably he understands by psychical exploration
-simply a careful questioning of the patient as to his material
-circumstances and concerning his motives for seeking a pension. We must
-on the other hand protect ourselves in that he calls this exploration
-“a method of individual psycho-analysis”. There is only one procedure
-that has a right to this name, that which the strict method of
-psycho-analysis has made its own.
-
-As an argument in favour of the psycho-genesis of the war neuroses it
-is a remarkable fact, which has been pointed out by Mörchen, Bonhöffer
-and others, that the traumatic neuroses are practically never seen in
-prisoners of war. The prisoners of war have no interest in remaining
-sick after being captured, and they cannot reckon on compensation,
-pension and sympathy from their surroundings while they are away from
-home. They feel themselves in their captivity secure for the time
-being from the dangers of the war. The theory of the mechanistic shock
-can never explain to us this difference in the behaviour of our own
-soldiers and prisoners of war.
-
-Evidence as regards the psycho-genesis rapidly accumulated. Schuster
-and many other observers refer to the disproportion between the trauma
-and its results on the nervous system. Severe neuroses arise from
-minimal shocks, while it is just the severe wounds accompanied by great
-shock that for the most part are not followed by nervous disturbances.
-Kurt Singer lays still greater stress on the disproportion between
-trauma and neurosis, and even endeavours to explain this fact
-psychologically: “In the kind of psychic trauma that comes on in a
-flash, in the terror, in the paralysing horror, we are concerned with
-cases of difficulty or impossibility of adaptation to the stimulus”.
-In a severe wound there is a discharge of the suddenly increased
-tension without anything further; when, however, no severe external
-injury exists the excessive affect is discharged “by means of a sudden
-abreaction through physical phenomena”. As the Freudian expression
-“abreaction” shows, psycho-analysis must have been in the mind of
-the writer when he thought out this theory. The expression sounds
-like a delayed response to the Breuer-Freudian conversion theory.
-However, it soon appears that Singer represents this process far too
-rationalistically; he looks upon the symptoms of the traumatic neuroses
-as the result of an effort on the part of the patient to find a
-comprehensible explanation of the (to him) inexplicable morbid process.
-Thus the work of this author is still far removed from the dynamic
-conception of the psychical processes of which psycho-analysis has
-taught us.
-
-Hauptmann, Schmidt and others drew attention to the relation in time
-in the development of the symptoms in the war neuroses. If it is a
-question of a mechanical injury then the effect should be strongest
-immediately after the operation of the force. Instead of which one
-finds that the men thrown into a state of shock still make purposive
-endeavours to arrange for their safety the moment after the trauma,
-such as to get to the dressing station, etc., and only after having
-put themselves under safe conditions do they collapse and the symptoms
-develop. In some cases the symptoms appear only when the men have to
-return to the firing line after a period of rest. Schmidt is quite
-right when he refers this conduct of the patients to the psychical
-factors; he suggests that the neurotic symptoms develop only after the
-state of a transitory disturbance of consciousness has disappeared
-and the men who have suffered the shock re-experience in memory the
-dangerous situation. We would say: These injured men behave like the
-mother who rescues her child from a danger which threatens its life
-with calm imperturbability and disregard of death, but faints after the
-act has been accomplished. It is immaterial as regards the judgment
-of the psychological situation that here the person saved was not a
-beloved stranger, but the beloved person himself.
-
-I place Nonne in the forefront of those authors who have laid
-particular stress on the psycho-genesis of the traumatic neuroses of
-the war. Not only because he recognised that the symptoms of the war
-shock neuroses were without exception hysterical, but because he was
-also able to cause the severest war neurotic symptoms to disappear for
-a time or to recall them by hypnotic and suggestive measures. This
-excluded the possibility even of a “molecular” disturbance in the
-nerve tissues; a disturbance that can be set right by means of psychic
-influences can itself have been nothing else than psychical.
-
-This therapeutic argument had the greatest effect; by degrees a marked
-silence fell over the mechanistic school, and attempts were frequently
-made to explain their former utterances psycho-genetically. The quarrel
-from now onwards lay entirely between the supporters of the various
-psychological theories.
-
-How is one to explain the method of working of psychical factors, and
-also the fact of the psychogenic condition being more severe than the
-impressive forms of disorders of organic origin?
-
-One is reminded of the old theory of Charcot, that terror and the
-memory of it can produce in a similar manner physical symptoms
-after the nature of hypnosis and auto-hypnosis, just as they are
-intentionally brought about by the post-hypnotic command of the
-hypnotist.
-
-This reverting to Charcot means nothing less than paving the way to
-fruitless speculations and the re-discovery of the sources from which
-finally psycho-analysis sprang; for we know that the first researches
-of Breuer and Freud into the psychical mechanisms of hysterical
-phenomena originated directly from the influence of Charcot’s clinical
-and experimental experiences. Hysterics suffer from reminiscences:
-this, the primary axiom of the germinating psycho-analysis, is really
-the continuation, deepening, and generalisation of the ideas of Charcot
-applied to the neuroses of shock; the idea of the lasting effect of a
-sudden affect and of the association of certain expressions of affect
-with the memory of the thing experienced is common to both.
-
-Let us now compare with this the views of German neurologists on
-the genesis of the war neuroses. Goldscheider says: “Sudden and
-terrifying impressions can leave behind affects direct and also with
-the associative help of ideation; to these memory pictures are due the
-results of increased and lowered excitability. Thus it is the emotion,
-the terror, which bestows upon the trauma the distribution and fixation
-of the nervous results of the stimulus, which never occurs with the
-purely physical stimulus itself”. It is easy to recognise that this
-description is borrowed from the traumatic theory of Charcot and the
-Freudian conversion theory.
-
-Gaupp’s opinion is similar: “In spite of all the methods of modern
-experimental psychology and of all the more precise and more delicate
-methods of technique for neurological and psychiatric investigation,
-there remains a residue, and not an insignificant one, in which we do
-not arrive at a diagnosis by means of the present exact neurological
-and psychiatric investigation of the condition at the moment present,
-but only through its connection with an exact anamnesis and with a
-laborious exploration of the pathogenesis of the existing condition”.
-Gaupp accepts even explicitly a Freudian postulation, in that he
-describes the war neuroses as a flight from psychic conflicts into
-illness and, alluding to psycho-analysis, he says: “Much preferable
-is the postulate of the effects of the unconscious on consciousness
-and the physical system than a psychological theory which seeks by
-words taken from the sciences of anatomy and physiology to gloss over
-the fact that the path from the physical to the mental and vice versa
-is entirely unknown to us”. In another place he goes still further
-and puts the psycho-analytical postulate of the unconscious in the
-centre of the whole problem. “If one only admits that mental processes
-can react upon the body even when they do not lie in the conscious
-field of vision, then most of the supposed difficulties disappear”.
-In this connection Hauptmann must also be mentioned. He looks upon
-the traumatic neuroses as mental illnesses psycho-genetically
-elaborated and caused through emotional factors, and their symptoms as
-“unconscious further elaboration of the emotional factors along paths
-of least resistance”.
-
-Bonhoeffer seems to have completely accepted the psychologically
-complex experiences of psycho-analysis. He holds that the traumatic
-symptoms are “psycho-neurotic fixations, dissociation phenomena which
-have been rendered possible through the resultant splitting off of the
-affect from its ideational content under the influence of the violent
-emotion”.
-
-Birnbaum showed in his excellent summary of the literature of the
-traumatic neuroses that in many of the explanations of these neuroses
-(for example, in Strümpell’s theory of covetousness) is summed up a
-psychogenic wish of hysteria, and says: “If the psychogenic wish,
-the wish fixation, etc. is an essential component of hysteria then
-it belongs unconditionally in the definition of the disorder”.
-Psycho-analysis has long maintained this; as is well known, it regards
-the neurotic symptoms as expressions of unconscious wishes or as
-reactions to them.
-
-Vogt also refers to the “famous Freudian statement” according to which
-the troubled mind flies into illness and he acknowledges that “the
-compulsion which originates from this is more often unconscious than
-conscious”. Liepmann divides the symptoms of the traumatic neuroses
-into the direct results of the psychic trauma and into “finally
-adjusted psychic mechanisms”. Schuster speaks of symptoms which are
-evoked by means of “unconscious processes”.
-
-You see, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that the experiences among
-war neurotics gradually led further than to the discovery of the mind;
-they led neurologists very nearly to the discovery of psycho-analysis.
-When we read in the more recent literature on the subject, of the ideas
-and views which have become so familiar,—abreaction, unconscious,
-psychic mechanisms, separation of the affect from its idea, etc.,—we
-might easily imagine ourselves to be in a circle of psycho-analysts,
-and yet it has never occurred to these investigators to ask
-themselves whether, after these experiences in the war neuroses, the
-psycho-analytical concepts cannot be made use of in the explanation of
-the usual neuroses and psychoses which were well known to us in peace
-times. The specificity of the war trauma is universally denied; in
-general, it is said, that the war neuroses contain nothing and have
-added nothing new to the already known symptomatology of the neuroses;
-even the Munich Congress of German Neurologists formally demanded the
-elimination of the word and concept, “war neurosis”. If, however, the
-peace and war neuroses are identical in their nature, then neurologists
-will be obliged to make use of all these ideas of emotional shock, of
-the fixation of pathogenic memories, and of their continued activity in
-the unconscious, etc., also in the explanation of the usual hysterias,
-the obsessional neuroses and the psychoses. They will be astonished how
-easy it will be for them to traverse the path trodden by Freud, and
-will regret having shown such obstinate resistance to his hints.
-
-To the question of the disposition to fall sick with a war neurosis
-the authors gave contradictory answers. Most of them follow the views
-of Gaupp, Laudenheimer and others, according to whom most of the war
-neurotics are _ab ovo_ neuropaths or psychopaths, the shock merely
-playing the part of the releasing factor. Bonhoeffer says direct:
-“The possibility of a psychopathological condition being evoked by
-psychogenic factors is the criterion of a degenerative predisposition”.
-Forster and Jendrassik say the same thing. Nonne, on the contrary,
-finds that the deciding factor in falling a victim to war neuroses
-lies less in the personal constitution than in the nature of the
-operating injury. Psycho-analysis takes a median position with regard
-to this question, which Freud has frequently and expressly stated.
-It speaks of an “aetiological succession” in the predisposition,
-the traumatic occasion figuring as reciprocal value with this. A
-trifling predisposition and severe shock can produce the same effects
-as an increased predisposition and a much lesser degree of shock.
-Psycho-analysis, however, is not content with the theoretical allusion
-to this condition, but it endeavours—with success—to separate the
-complex idea of the “disposition” into simpler elements and establish
-those constitutional factors that influence the choice of neurosis (the
-special tendency to fall sick with this or that neurosis). I shall
-return later to the question as to where psycho-analysis looks for the
-special disposition to falling sick with a traumatic neurosis.
-
-The literature concerning the symptomatology of the neuroses of the
-war is simply immense. According to Gaupp, for example, the following
-hysterical symptoms are to be observed. “Attacks of a slight nature
-up to those of the severest kind, with an _arc de cercle_ lasting for
-hours, sometimes with epileptic frequency, astasia-abasia, anomalies of
-the position and movement of the body even to going on all fours, all
-the varieties of tic and shaking tremors, paralyses and contractures
-in monoplegic, hemiplegic and paraplegic forms, deafness and deaf and
-dumbness, stuttering and stammering, aphonia and rhythmical screaming,
-blindness with or without blepharo-spasm, all kinds of disturbances of
-sensation, and most of all twilight states in quantities never before
-met with and in combination with phenomena of physical irritation
-and disorders”. You see, it is like a museum of glaring hysterical
-symptoms, and whoever has once seen it will plainly have to decline
-Oppenheim’s view, according to which purely neurotic symptoms are
-rarely seen in the traumatic neuroses of the war. Schuster draws
-attention to the frequent vasomotor and trophic phenomena; according to
-him, these are no longer psychogenic. Psycho-analysis, however, will
-agree with those who hold that these symptoms can originate to some
-extent from psychic causes, analogous to the physical alterations which
-can be produced under hypnosis. Finally, all the authors allude to the
-alterations in disposition, apathy and over-excitability, etc. after
-the trauma.
-
-Out of this chaos of symptoms the “trembling” neurosis stands out
-through its frequency and conspicuousness. You all know those
-pathetic creatures who hobble along through the streets with shaking
-knees, uncertain gait and peculiar motor disturbances. They give
-the impression of being helpless and incurable invalids; and yet
-experience shows that also this traumatic form of illness is purely
-psychogenic. A single treatment with electricity and suggestion, a
-few hypnotic sittings are often sufficient in rendering these men
-capable of doing some work, if only temporarily and under certain
-conditions. Erben has made the most careful investigation into these
-disturbances of innervation; he found that these disturbances are
-only suspended or increased when the respective group of muscles
-carry out an action or intend to do so. His explanation for this
-is, that here the “volitional impulse makes a path for the spasm”,
-which, however, is only the physiological paraphrase of the facts
-of the case. Psycho-analysis suspects here a psychical motivation:
-the activity of an unconscious contrary wish which puts itself in the
-way of the consciously wished act. This is indeed most striking in
-those patients of Erben who are prevented from going forward through
-the most violent attacks of shaking, but can carry out the much more
-difficult task of going backwards without trembling. Erben also here
-has a complicated physiological explanation ready, but forgets that
-the movement backwards, which removes the patient from the dangerous
-goal of the forward movement—and finally from the front line—does
-not need to be disturbed by any contrary wish. The remaining kinds
-of motor disturbances demand a similar interpretation, in particular
-the striking, uncontrollable running of many neurotics, so like the
-propulsion in paralysis agitans. These are the men who do not recover
-from the effect of the terror and are still always flying from dangers
-to which they were once exposed.
-
-Many investigators, including non-psycho-analysts, came to the
-conclusion from these and similar observations, that these disturbances
-are not the direct effects of the trauma, but psychical reactions to it
-and act in the service of the instinct of self-preservation against the
-repetition of the unpleasant occurrence. We know that also the normal
-organism has at its disposal such protective measures. The symptoms of
-the terror, such as the immovable legs, the tremblings, the hesitating
-speech, seem to be useful automatisms; one is reminded by them of
-certain animals which simulate being dead when danger threatens. And if
-Bonhoeffer looks upon these traumatic disturbances as fixations of the
-means of expression of the terrible emotion which has been suffered,
-Nonne goes further and discovers that “the hysterical symptoms
-represent partly a reminiscence of inborn guard and defence mechanisms,
-the suppression of which in those individuals whom we call hysterical
-has not taken place in the normal degree or not at all”. According
-to Hamburger the most frequently occurring type of disturbances of
-standing, walking and speech associated with shaking tremors represents
-a “complex of ideas of feebleness, weakness, refusal and exhaustion”,
-and Gaupp sees in the same symptoms the lapse into infantile and
-puerile states of obvious helplessness. Some authors actually speak of
-the “fixation” in the traumatic posture of the body and innervation.
-
-It cannot escape the notice of anyone with a knowledge of
-psycho-analysis how near these authors, without knowing it, are to
-psycho-analysis. The “expressions of fixations of movements” described
-by them are in reality only paraphrases of the Breuer-Freudian
-hysterical conversion, and the lapse into atavistic and infantile
-methods of reaction is nothing more nor less than what Freud called
-special attention to as the regressive character of the neurotic
-symptoms, all of which according to him only signify reversions into
-ontogenetic and phylogenetic stages of development already overcome.
-At any rate we have definite proof that neurologists have now decided
-to _interpret_ certain nervous symptoms, that is to say, refer them
-to unconscious psychical contents, which would never have occurred to
-anyone to do before the introduction of psycho-analysis.
-
-I will now speak of the few authors who occupy themselves with the war
-neuroses from the psycho-analytical points of view.
-
-Stern has published a work on the psycho-analytical treatment of the
-war neuroses in war hospitals. I have not been able to see the work in
-the original, but I learn from the abstracts that the author proceeds
-from the point of view of repression and finds the situation of the
-serving soldier particularly suited to the production of neuroses in
-consequence of the suppression of affects which his service demands.
-Schuster admits that the investigations of Freud “however one may feel
-towards them” have thrown a ray of light on the psycho-genesis of
-the neuroses; they assist in revealing the hidden connection between
-symptom and psychical content which still exists though difficult to
-discover. Mohr treats the war neuroses by the cathartic method of
-Breuer and Freud, by getting the patients to live through the critical
-scenes again and brings about an abreaction of their affects by
-letting them re-experience the terrible emotion. Simmel is the only
-one up to the present who has occupied himself methodically with the
-psycho-catharsis of the war neuroses, and he will give his own report
-of his experiences to the Congress. Finally, I will mention my own
-investigations concerning the psychology of the war neuroses, in which
-I made the attempt to bring the traumatic forms of disorder into the
-category of psycho-analysis.
-
-In this connection I will allude to a discussion which branches
-out in all directions on the question whether an affect can still
-act psycho-genetically when the person concerned immediately loses
-consciousness. Goldscheider and many others still maintain that a
-psychical effect is made impossible through swooning, and Aschaffenburg
-adheres to the view that loss of consciousness before falling ill
-guards against the neurosis. Nonne rightly opposes this view, and
-points out that unconscious mental streams could act psychically in
-spite of the loss of consciousness. L. Mann, relying on Breuer’s
-hypnoidal theory, puts forward the view that the loss of consciousness
-before falling ill does not protect but disposes to the appearance of
-the neurosis, by preventing the discharge of the affects. Orlovsky
-expresses himself the most rationally on this vexed question; he points
-out the possibility that the swooning itself can be a psychogenic
-symptom, a flight into unconsciousness, which would spare the person
-concerned the conscious experiencing of the painful situation and
-sensations.
-
-The possibility of the psychogenic formation of symptoms during a faint
-is quite comprehensible to those of us who are psycho-analysts. This
-problem could be started only by authors who take up a standpoint,
-obsolete to psycho-analysis, that equates mental with conscious.
-
-I do not know, ladies and gentlemen, whether you also have obtained
-the impression from all these quotations and references (which are
-only taken at random from the literature) that an advance, even though
-one that is not admitted, has taken place in the attitude of leading
-neurologists towards the teachings of psycho-analysis. Moreover, candid
-recognition is not lacking; for example, the expression of Nonne, that
-Freud’s experiences concerning the elaboration in the unconscious have
-received interesting illuminations and corroborations through the
-experiences of the war.
-
-However, the same sentence of acknowledgement also contains a
-nihilistic opinion of Nonne concerning psycho-analysis; he states
-that Freud’s idea of the almost exclusively sexual foundation of
-hysteria has been conclusively disproved during the war. We can no
-longer leave this unanswered, which after all is only a partial
-denial of psycho-analysis: also we can very easily give the answer.
-The war neuroses, according to psycho-analysis, belong to a group of
-neuroses in which not only is the genital sexuality affected, as in
-ordinary hysteria, but also its precursor, the so-called narcissism,
-self-love, just as in dementia praecox and paranoia. I grant that
-the sexual foundation of these so-called narcissistic neuroses is
-less easily apparent, particularly to those who equate sexuality and
-genitality and have neglected to use the word “sexual” in the sense
-of the old platonic Eros. Psycho-analysis, however, returns to this
-extremely ancient standpoint when it treats all tender and sensual
-relations of the man to his own or to the opposite sex, emotional
-feelings towards friends, relatives and fellow-creatures generally,
-even the affective behaviour towards one’s own ego and body, partly
-under the rubric “erotism”, otherwise “sexuality”. It cannot be denied
-that those to whom this idea is strange cannot so easily be convinced
-of the correctness of Freud’s postulation of the sexual theory in a
-narcissistic neurosis in particular, for example, in the traumatic
-neurosis. We should like to advise them to examine themselves into the
-usual (non-traumatic) hysteria and obsessional neuroses also, and to
-keep strictly to the methods of free association, dream and symptom
-interpretation proposed by Freud; then they will be much more easily
-convinced of the correctness of the sexual theories of the neuroses,
-and agreement about the sexual background of the war neuroses will
-follow. At any rate the triumph concerning the overthrow of the sexual
-theories is somewhat premature.
-
-The observation that I have made as regards the participation of sexual
-factors in the formation of symptoms in the traumatic neuroses also
-shows that in traumatic neurotics the genital sexual hunger (libido)
-and potency is generally greatly injured; in many cases it can even be
-entirely suspended and that for long periods. This condition which is a
-positive one is alone sufficient to demonstrate the rashness of Nonne’s
-conclusion[3].
-
-Ladies and gentlemen: With what I have said I have discharged the chief
-task of my paper, which was the critical survey of the literature on
-the war neuroses from the standpoint of psycho-analysis. However,
-I will make use of this rare opportunity to tell you some of the
-observations I have made myself, and I will present points of view
-which may help to explain these conditions psycho-analytically.
-
-In the psychical sphere of the traumatic neuroses there predominate
-such symptoms as hypochondriacal depression, terror, anxiousness, and a
-high degree of irritability with a tendency to outbursts of anger. Most
-of these symptoms can be traced back to _increased ego-sensitiveness_
-(in particular the hypochondria and the incapability of tolerating
-physical or mental discomfort). This over-sensitiveness arises from
-the fact that in consequence of the shock, which has been experienced
-once or repeatedly, the interest and sexual hunger (libido) of the
-patients is withdrawn from the object into the ego. There thus comes
-about a damming-up of the sexual hunger (libido) in the ego, which is
-expressed in those abnormal hypochondriacal organic sensations and
-over-sensitiveness. Frequently this heightened ego-love degenerates
-into a kind of infantile narcissism: the patients would like to be
-pampered, cared for, and pitied like children. One can therefore speak
-of a reversion into the childish stage of self-love. This heightening
-corresponds to the diminution of object-love, often also of genital
-potency. A man who is already predisposed to narcissism will of course
-sooner fall a victim to a traumatic neurosis; still no one is entirely
-immune from it, since the stage of narcissism forms a significant
-fixation point in the development of the sexual hunger (libido) of
-every human being. The combination with other narcissistic neuroses,
-especially paranoia and dementia, frequently occurs.
-
-The symptom of anxiety is the sign of the shock to the self-confidence
-occasioned by the trauma. This is most strikingly expressed in men who,
-in consequence of an explosion, have been knocked down, hurled over
-or blown up and have thereby permanently lost their self-confidence.
-The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia with
-trembling) are protective measures against the repetition of the
-anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which these
-symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms, on
-the contrary, which simply express the situation at the moment of the
-explosion (innervation, position of the body) are conversion-hysterias
-in the psycho-analytical sense. Also in the anxiety there is naturally
-a constitutional predisposition; those persons more easily fall ill in
-this way who, in spite of real cowardice, are compelled from ambition
-to perform courageous deeds. The anxiety-hysterical disturbance in
-walking is at the same time a reversion to an infantile stage of
-not-being-able-to-walk or of learning-to-walk.
-
-Also the tendency to outbursts of rage and anger is a highly primitive
-method of reaction to a superior force; it can increase up to epileptic
-attacks, and represents more or less incoordinate discharges of affect
-analogous to those observed in the period of suckling. A milder variety
-of this loss of restraint is the lack of adaptation to discipline,
-which is practically never missing in the traumatic neuroses. The
-excessive need for love and the narcissism also give rise to this
-increased irritability.
-
-The entire personality of most of the victims of trauma corresponds
-therefore to the child who is fretting, whimpering, unrestrained and
-naughty in consequence of a fright. The excessive importance which
-almost all the persons suffering from trauma attach to good food fits
-in with this picture. The slightest neglect in this respect may produce
-in them the most violent outbreaks of affect and even induce fits. Most
-of them are unwilling to work, they wish to be supported and provided
-for like a child.
-
-It is here, therefore, not only a question, as Strümpell considers,
-of the production of illnesses on account of an actual gain (pension,
-compensation for injury, flight from the front) which are only
-secondary illness gains; the primary motive for the illness is the
-pleasure itself of remaining in the secure retreat of the childish
-situation once so unwillingly left behind. Both these narcissistic and
-apprehensive manifestations of illness have their atavistic prototype;
-it is even possible that the neurosis often reverts to methods of
-reaction which play no part at all in the individual development
-(feigning of death by animals, methods of progress and protection of
-the young of animals in the ancestral series). It is as though an
-over-strong affect could no longer be compensated along normal paths,
-but had to regress to previously abandoned but virtually existent
-mechanisms of reaction. I do not doubt that many other pathological
-reactions will yet be revealed as recapitulations of overcome methods
-of adaptation.
-
-As symptoms of the traumatic neuroses which are less appreciated, I
-might mention the over-sensitiveness of all the senses (shunning of
-light, hyperacusis, extreme ticklishness) and the anxiety dreams. The
-real terrors that have been experienced, or things similar to them, are
-lived through again and again in these dreams. I am following a hint of
-Freud’s when I look upon these terrors and anxiety dreams, as well as
-the state of terror by day, as spontaneous attempts of cure on the part
-of the patient. They serve to bring piecemeal to conscious abreaction
-the shock, which in its totality was intolerable and unintelligible
-and was therefore converted into symptoms, and to contribute to the
-adjustment of the disturbed equilibrium in the psychical economy.
-
-Ladies and gentlemen, I hope these few remarks of mine may serve as
-proof that the psycho-analytical conception discloses points of view
-where the rest of neurology leaves us in the lurch.
-
-From the methodical psycho-analysis of many cases we ought to expect
-the full explanation of these morbid conditions and perhaps also their
-radical cure.
-
-[Illustration]
-
-While this article was in the press, I read the interesting work of
-Prof. E. Moro, the childrens’ specialist of Heidelberg, on “the first
-Trimenon”, _i. e._ the peculiarities of the first three months of the
-infant’s life. He says: “If one lays a young infant on a pillow on a
-table and strikes the pillow on either side with the hands, then there
-results a peculiar reflex action. Both arms are thrown up symmetrically
-apart and then come together again in a curve with easy tonic
-movements. A similar movement is carried out simultaneously by the
-legs”. We would say: Moro has here artificially produced a little shock
-(or traumatic) neurosis. The remarkable thing in this action is that
-this reflex to the shock in the young infant of less than three months
-old shows signs of the natural reflexes of clasping, which characterise
-the “carried offspring”, _i. e_. the young of animals (monkeys) which
-are compelled with the help of a pronounced clasping reflex to hold
-fast with the fingers to the mother’s fur while she climbs about the
-trees. We would say: Atavistic reversion of the method of reaction in
-sudden terror[4].
-
-
-
-
-2. DR. KARL ABRAHAM, Berlin.
-
-During the war academic neurologists have come round more and more
-to regard the aetiology of the traumatic neuroses from psychological
-points of view. However, in spite of the approach towards our views,
-mentioned by Ferenczi, their ideas differ from ours in two respects,
-namely, they for the most part only take into consideration the
-reactions of the ego impulses to the trauma, and they keep entirely to
-the manifest expressions of the neurosis. In the following remarks,
-besides those factors which we do not dispute, I intend to deal with
-the unconscious and sexual ones.
-
-When in peace times psycho-analysis upheld the sexual aetiology of the
-neuroses it was often pointed out as a contrary argument that this
-could not hold good for the traumatic neuroses. Similarly now the
-opinion is expressed that the genesis of the war neuroses contravenes
-our ideas. Terror, anxiety lest the dangerous situation be repeated,
-seeking for a pension, and some vague idea of disposition are supposed
-to be adequate explanations of the illness; in the mass of the neuroses
-which have broken out during the war the unimportance of the sexual
-aetiology is thought to be clearly shown.
-
-My investigations of the traumatic neuroses in peace time had for
-a long time led me to conclude the importance of sexuality in them
-similar to that in the other neuroses, but they have not yet been
-sufficiently numerous and conclusive enough for publication. I might
-mention the case of a young girl who met with a slight tram accident
-when she was in the throes of a serious erotic conflict. The analysis
-showed that the accident in a certain measure gave a pretext for the
-outbreak of the neurosis. The symptoms were in connection with the
-conflict in question; the importance of the trauma receded quite
-into the background. I might also add that some litigious cases of
-traumatic neurosis which I observed in greater detail all suffered from
-impotence; this disturbance was produced by the accident, but seemed to
-have its real basis in old and unconscious sexual resistances.
-
-The investigation of war neurotics has fully confirmed my surmises
-connected with such observations. Moreover, the recurrence of certain
-definite symptoms in war neurotics, which were familiar to me not only
-in the traumatic neuroses of peace time, but also in the non-traumatic
-cases, seems to me worth noting. I refer particularly to the complex of
-symptoms which we could so often observe during the war in the anxiety
-cases with trembling, such as trembling, agitation, irritability,
-sensitiveness, sleeplessness, headaches, anxiety, depression of
-spirits and feelings of incompetency. Two neurotic types with the
-same symptoms—although these do not appear so prominently as in the
-war—would be the impotent man and the frigid woman. A similarity which
-is so marked in external phenomena leads one to expect a similarity
-also in internal processes.
-
-All my experience fully coincides with that which Ferenczi has just
-communicated. The trauma acts on the sexuality of many persons in
-the sense that it gives the impulse to a regressive alteration which
-endeavours to reach narcissism. I might add that we both arrived at
-this idea without having previously even mentioned it to one another.
-The trauma, however, has this effect only in a portion of those
-participating in the war, hence we are unable to dispense with the
-assumption of an individual disposition, but we are in the position to
-define it far more accurately than the prevailing school of neurology.
-A couple of examples will make the problem before us clearer.
-
-At the beginning of the war a soldier at the front was wounded on
-August, 12th, 1914. Before his wound was completely healed he secretly
-left the hospital and went again to the front, soon getting a second
-and after a few months a third wound. After repeated returns to the
-front he was one day blown up by a shell explosion and was unconscious
-for two days. After these four traumata he certainly presented the
-phenomena following upon shock, but no neurotic picture, being neither
-particularly anxious, depressed nor excited. Another man at the front
-during a night attack fell into a hole without injuring himself, but
-immediately developed neurotic trembling of a most severe kind, and
-presented the picture of a mental breakdown. How are such differences
-to be explained?
-
-The previous history of such people, and naturally, still more, a
-penetrating analysis, teaches us why the one in spite of the severest
-physical and mental influences of the war remains to all intents and
-purposes healthy, and why the other reacts to relatively trifling
-stimuli with a severe neurosis. It transpires with great regularity
-that the war neurotics already before the trauma were labile people—to
-designate it, to begin with, by a general expression—and especially
-so as regards their sexuality. Many of these men were unable to carry
-out their tasks in practical life, others that were capable of doing
-this, however, showed little initiative and manifested little impelling
-energy. In all of them sexual activity was diminished, their sexual
-hunger (libido) being checked through fixations; in many of them
-already before the campaign potency was weak or they were only potent
-under certain conditions. Their attitude towards the female sex was
-more or less disturbed through partial fixation of the sexual hunger
-(libido) in the developmental stage of narcissism. Their sexual and
-social capacity of functioning was dependent on their making certain
-concessions to their narcissism.
-
-In the war these men were placed under completely changed conditions
-and in the face of extraordinary demands. They had always to be
-prepared for unconditional self-sacrifice in favour of the mass.
-This signifies the renunciation of all narcissistic privileges. The
-healthy person is able to accomplish such a complete suppression of
-his narcissism: he loves according to the transference type, and so is
-capable of sacrificing his ego for the whole. In this respect those
-disposed to neuroses are inferior to healthy persons.
-
-It is not only demanded of these men in the field that they must
-tolerate dangerous situations—a purely passive performance—but there is
-a second demand which has been much too little considered, I allude to
-the aggressive acts for which the soldier must be hourly prepared, for
-besides the readiness to die, the readiness to kill is demanded of him.
-
-A further factor which operates on the labile sexuality of those
-disposed to neuroses is the almost exclusive association with men.
-The sexuality of the normal person takes no harm from this, but it
-is otherwise in men with strong narcissistic traits. The knowledge
-of the connection between homosexuality and narcissism enables us to
-understand this.
-
-The previously unstable attitude towards women begins to waver under
-such conditions. If the lability of the attitude towards the other
-sex is very great then it does not need even a war trauma to cause
-a neurosis to break out in such men. For instance, I observed a man
-who on return from furlough at home had a convulsive attack and was
-brought into the hospital showing signs of anxiety and depression. The
-man had always been noted for his effeminate disposition, and in his
-married life was weakly potent and always inclined to jealousy. When he
-was home on leave he failed absolutely in the attempt to have sexual
-relations with his wife. His fears that his wife would be unfaithful to
-him reached a crisis, and soon after his departure from home he had his
-convulsive attack.
-
-Such men with labile heterosexual impulses need a support for their
-sexuality. They frequently find this in their wife on whom their
-sexual hunger (libido) is completely dependent, or they have to defend
-themselves from their feelings of insecurity sexually by having
-constantly to convince themselves that they are potent by going with
-prostitutes. And so in war they constantly need a support for their
-wavering activity. Their military usefulness also is dependent upon
-conditions. They are frequently useful in rank and file, supporting
-their activity upon that of their comrades. A changed situation, and
-occurrence, which with a marked disposition needs only to be very
-trifling, upsets the balance, making the previously weakly-active man
-wholly passive. The passivity is expressed then not only in the sphere
-of the ego impulses, but likewise in that of the sexual impulses. The
-narcissism breaks out. The capability of the transference of the sexual
-hunger (libido) dies away as well as the capacity of self-sacrifice in
-favour of the community. On the contrary, we now have a patient before
-us who himself needs care and consideration on the part of others, who
-in a typically narcissistic manner is in constant anxiety about his
-life and health. The obtrusiveness of the symptoms (tremors, attacks,
-etc.) is also narcissistic. Many of the patients show themselves
-completely female-passive in the surrender to their suffering. In their
-symptoms they are experiencing anew the situation which had caused the
-neurosis to break out, and soliciting the sympathy of other people.
-
-At this juncture we must again refer to the previously mentioned
-circumstance that in our patients the anxiety as regards killing is
-of a similar significance to that of dying. The symptoms in part
-are only comprehensible in this sense. The case of a man who in the
-field suffered from a relapse of a neurosis which he had had six
-years previously is especially instructive. At that time he was taken
-with a tremor of his arm which arose in connection with a dream in
-which he murdered someone; a hand-to-hand fight in the field caused
-the old symptom to reappear. Hysterical convulsive attacks are not
-only produced through dangerous situations, terror, etc., but not
-infrequently an act of aggression which he has failed to carry out is
-expressed in them. Such an attack is especially often associated with
-an exchange of words with his superiors; the suppressed impulse to
-forcible activity finds in the expression its motor discharge.
-
-The complete instability of many war neurotics, their disconcerting
-depression, their propensity to thoughts of death, find a further
-explanation in a particular effect of the trauma. Many of the
-neurotically disposed persons, up to the moment when the trauma upsets
-them, have supported themselves only through an illusion connected
-with their narcissism, namely, through the belief in their immortality
-and invulnerability. The effect of an explosion, a wound, or things of
-a like nature suddenly destroys this belief. The narcissistic security
-gives way to a feeling of powerlessness and the neurosis sets in.
-
-To what an extent the regression can go is shown in those cases,
-described also in the literature, in which the patients display the
-conduct of little children. One of my patients who was previously
-neurotic was thrown into this kind of condition through the terrifying
-effect of a mine explosion. For a long time he behaved like a terrified
-little child. For many weeks he could only reply to all questions about
-his trouble with the two words, “Mine bombs”. He had therefore gone
-back to the mode of expression of a child hardly two years old.
-
-What apparently is an exception to the statement made at the
-commencement is the following noteworthy case in which a previously
-healthy, proficient and sexually completely potent young man was
-taken in the field with a severe astasia-abasia coupled with a very
-great over-excitability of affect. An explosion had hurled the lower
-part of his back against the side of the trench; he had therefore
-suffered a trauma, and had been already treated by various neurologists
-for “traumatic hysteria”. A careful physical examination showed me
-undoubted signs of an affection of the Conus Medullaris, manifestly a
-haematomyelia. The patient remembered that after the trauma he could
-not retain his urine and faeces, still he continued at his post because
-he looked upon this condition as the result of terror. These symptoms
-improved in the following weeks. However, during the same period he
-noticed the disappearance of all sexual feelings. At first he was not
-inclined to look upon this condition, which was disquietening to him,
-at all seriously, having no idea that he had an organic impotence.
-During leave at home he had to come to the conclusion that the sexual
-insensitiveness was in no way to be overcome. Now the neurosis
-appeared, not as the result of the psychic impression of the explosion,
-but as a reaction to the organic impotence of traumatic origin. This
-neurosis differed, by the way, from the usual traumatic neuroses
-through the euphoristic, at times even manic state of mind.
-
-This difference needs special appreciation and explanation. Also
-other men who have received severe organic injuries show such mental
-attitudes which must surprise us. For example, I have always found
-that in the amputation hospitals a strikingly cheerful mood prevails.
-At the beginning of the war I had my attention drawn to the euphoria
-of the severely wounded men by a particular occurrence. I had to treat
-four soldiers in a general hospital, who through the splintering of
-the same shell had had their eyes severely injured. All four had
-already had enucleation performed in another hospital. They were in
-no way depressed but gave themselves up to a careless, serene frame
-of mind. When they—all at the same time—received their artificial
-eyes a remarkable scene took place. They jumped, danced, and laughed
-in boisterous spirits, just like children who work themselves up into
-a frenzy of joy. Also here there is without doubt a regression to
-narcissism, it is however of a more partial nature. These patients
-repress the knowledge that through the mutilation they have experienced
-a depreciation in a more or less high degree, especially in the eyes
-of the female sex. What they lose in love from outside they seek to
-compensate by means of self-love. The damaged part of the body receives
-for them a significance as an erotogenic zone which did not previously
-belong to it[5].
-
-All the experiences here communicated speak unanimously in the
-sense that the war neuroses are not to be understood without taking
-the sexuality into consideration. This view receives a valuable
-confirmation by means of the mental disturbances observed in the war,
-which—like mental troubles in general—very often more easily manifest
-the latent content of their ideas than the neuroses. The mental
-disturbances which have broken out in the field, as other observers
-have confirmed, are associated only in a trifling part with the
-formation of delusions. However, if there is a delusion then it has
-even a manifest sexual content. In the cases I have seen the delusions
-are partly of jealousy, partly of homosexual persecution by comrades.
-I might mention the paranoid illness of a soldier which broke out when
-he, after long service in the field, went home on furlough and turned
-out to be impotent with his wife. A very transparent symbolism and
-other signs pointed with certainty to the significance of homosexual
-components as the fundamental cause of the delusion. Another man had
-the delusion of being, during sleep, infected with syphilis in the
-hospital by his comrades, the origin of the delusion was here also the
-result of imperfectly repressed homosexuality.
-
-In this connection I should like to mention another remarkable case. In
-1915 when I was acting at a surgical station a man was treated there
-for a gunshot wound of the penis. The operation, which was carried out
-by a well known surgeon, was quite successful. Two years later the same
-patient came to my psychiatric station. The man who was previously
-unaffected psychically now showed a paranoid mental disturbance. On
-questioning him it appeared that in consequence of the wound there
-existed entire genital anaesthesia. Also here the psychosis appeared to
-stand in close connection with the cessation of genital manliness.
-
-The so-called “seeking for pension” of many men injured in the war is
-as little explained by means of the current ideas on the matter as
-the symptoms of the neurosis. This also stands in connection with the
-alterations of the sexual hunger (libido), just as do the neurotic
-symptoms. The patient only apparently fights for compensation for the
-stiffened wrist, for the shot-off finger, for his neurotic trouble. It
-is quite overlooked as a rule that the neurotic inwardly perceives the
-alteration which has taken place as regards his sexual hunger (libido).
-He is filled with the feeling of an enormous injury. And he is so
-far right when he actually has suffered loss from his capability for
-transference of his sexual hunger (libido) and therewith an important
-basis of the belief in himself. A man injured by an accident before the
-war once told me that he had come to an agreement with his insurance
-company for a definite compensation. Hardly had this occurred when
-the thought came to him that this sum did not even remotely cover
-his actual injury. Henceforth the sum which according to his idea he
-ought to have claimed rapidly rose to an enormous amount. The pension
-compensates only for the diminution of the capacity for earning a
-livelihood, so far as this is objectively demonstrable, not for that
-which the patient subjectively feels; he cannot be compensated for his
-reduced capacity for object-love. Narcissism also explains here the
-conduct of the patients. Where previously the capability of surrender
-(in every sense of the word) existed, now the narcissistic avarice
-dominates. The genital zone has lost its predominance; anal erotism
-is strengthened. It is clear that the state pension favours the
-development of the character traits described; this only takes place,
-however, when the tendency already exists in the injured person to
-react narcissistically to an external injury to his integrity.
-
-Now as regards the question of the therapy and particularly that of the
-psycho-analytic.
-
-At the commencement of the war one took little notice of the neurotics,
-they were placed perchance in a convalescent home but practically
-without treatment. The increasing number of neurotic cases necessitated
-other measures. The old method of “surprisal” was again dug up. Then
-came the period of “active” curative procedures, the best known of
-which is Kaufmann’s. These methods were at first deceptive from the
-fact that they led to the rapid improvement of a great number of
-patients. As regards, however, the duration of the cure, they have
-not yielded what was hoped of them, and, in addition, they produced
-certain unwished-for phenomena. The military medical authorities
-therefore display a lively interest in putting on one side the too
-“active” methods in favour of other effective but less severe ones.
-
-Is psycho-analysis able to step into the breach? Theoretically we are
-justified in assuming that it is, because psycho-analysis alone of all
-methods of treatment is a causal one. We also have already practical
-experience to go upon; I refer to the publications of Simmel. I will
-now briefly speak of my own therapeutic experiences. We psycho-analysts
-had to be extremely cautious in our treatment of war neuroses, for
-the addresses at medical congresses and the literature before the war
-had demonstrated very clearly the refusal of the medical profession
-to accept the conclusions of our ideas and efforts. When in 1916
-I founded a station for neuroses and mental diseases I abstained
-entirely from all forcible therapy, likewise from hypnosis and other
-suggestive means, but allowed the patients to abreact in the waking
-state and sought to make intelligible to them by a kind of simplified
-psycho-analysis the origin and nature of their suffering. I aimed at
-arousing in the patients the feeling of being understood, complete
-relaxation, and improvement. Later the station became that of a pure
-observation station, chiefly for mental diseases; hence I could only
-collect isolated therapeutic experiences.
-
-The objection that psycho-analysis works too slowly does not hold good
-as far as our experience goes up to the present.
-
-Latterly it has appeared that the patients treated accordingly by the
-Kaufmann method frequently relapsed when they were withdrawn from the
-influence of the doctor, or were again exposed to the dangers of the
-front. Time will show whether the psycho-analytic methods will procure
-more lasting cures. I will communicate in conclusion the result,
-instructive in this connection, of the recent treatment of a neurosis
-carried out in my private practice. I was able in a few weeks to remove
-a severe phobia in a boy twelve years old, which referred to air raids.
-The cure persisted when the boy returned home; he was there again daily
-exposed to the risk of air raids and put up with this situation just
-like a healthy person. Perhaps this result justifies the expectation
-that psycho-analysis will in fact in the permanence of its cures fill
-up the gaps that exist at present. Psycho-analysis, which enables us to
-penetrate deeper than any other method into the structure of the war
-neuroses, will perhaps take therapeutic precedence also in the sphere
-of the war neuroses[6].
-
-
-
-
-3. DR. ERNST SIMMEL, Berlin.
-
-For the past eighteen months I have been in charge of a special
-hospital for war neuroses, and the mass treatment necessary in such an
-institution has enabled me to make a comparative study of the different
-so-called psycho-therapeutic methods. Apart from the serious objections
-that can be raised with regard to all forcible and restrictive methods,
-which for the most part produce new psychic injuries, there are serious
-doubts as to the use of pure suggestion in the form of hypnosis when
-carried out indiscriminately as a blind technique for war neurotics.
-The removal of the symptom, which is done regardless of the remaining
-psychic constellations of the patient, generally produces at the
-same time a considerable general disturbance with marked subjective
-symptoms, such as headache, feelings of pressure on the head, insomnia,
-diminution of intellectual capacity, sexual impotence, etc.
-
-On the other hand, the frequently observed fact that with the
-disappearance of the manifest symptom the neurosis appears in another
-form, has proved that with all these kinds of palliative measures the
-root cause of the suffering has not been touched.
-
-A medical treatment that is to be effective can only be built up on the
-pathogenesis of a disease. The psycho-pathogenesis of the war neurosis,
-(and no intelligent man any longer doubts its psychic origin),
-obviously can be elucidated only by means of psycho-analysis. It is
-intelligible that a hospital regime necessitating the simultaneous
-treatment of a large number of cases and calling for rapid curative
-results, would allow a more extensive individual analysis only in a
-few cases. On account of this I had from the beginning to cut down
-the length of the treatment. A combination of analytical-cathartic
-hypnosis with analytical conversations during the waking state, and
-dream interpretation carried out both in the waking state and in deep
-hypnosis, has given me a method which on an average of two or three
-sittings brought about relief of the symptoms. This mode of treatment
-implies a systematic investigation of the symptoms that have appeared
-in consequence of the incongruity of the war experience and the
-psychic preparedness of the patient; such investigation being both
-aetiologically conditioned as to its nature and automatically effective
-as to its working. With the disappearance of the symptoms the
-essential treatment of the war neurotics, according to modern hospital
-methods, was looked upon as being at an end. An analytical cure of the
-entire personality by a shortened and combined method will have to be
-reserved for the psychological clinic of the future.
-
-The psycho-analytical explanation of the war neuroses has proved with
-wonderful clearness the correctness of the Freudian views on hysteria,
-according to which all physical symptoms represent conversions of
-something psychical. The body is the instrument of the mind upon
-which it (the mind) allows its unconscious to manifest itself in
-plastic and mimic expression. The functions of the unconscious are the
-deciding factor in the formation and building up of the war neuroses,
-also the frequently observed instances of the forgetting of events
-accompanied by feelings hostile to the ego, even when these events
-are very recent, permits us to recognise from the outside alone the
-submergence and repression of ideas and affects of a painful nature. It
-is comprehensible that under the pressure of years of discipline, which
-limits the personality and thereby prevents every individual reaction
-to events, the disposition to repression is extraordinarily favoured.
-To what degree an enforced sexual abstinence further increases this
-could not be tested.
-
-The unconscious meaning of the _symptoms_ of the war neurotics, as
-we may state by anticipation, is for the most part of a non-sexual
-nature, there being exhibited in them all those war-produced affects
-of terror, anxiety, rage, etc. associated with ideas corresponding
-with the actual occurrences of the war. Stekel is quite wrong in
-concluding from my statements that I categorically deny a sexual basis
-for neuroses in general, since at present only the _symptomatology_
-of the war neuroses is explained on the basis of these analytical
-investigations. The fact of the predisposition to neuroses is still
-a long way from being exhausted. The fact that in the midst of the
-self-same experiences one soldier remains well while another becomes
-a neurotic may, so far as my experience goes, be very well connected
-with the psycho-sexual constellation of the particular person. The
-systematic investigation of the dream-life of the soldier, even after
-the removal of the war neurotic symptoms, has indeed made it possible
-to recognise quite frequently threads that lead down to the primordial
-network of infantile sexuality. Also many soldiers who have broken down
-solely under the pressure of discipline show even in this abortive
-form of analysis an attitude of father defiance in consequence of an
-infantile mother fixation as the subconscious condition of their need
-for opposition. In some cases even the sexual trauma of childhood
-becomes evident as the latent basis of the war neurosis just in the
-quick and deep view which is gained by hypnosis in the combined form of
-treatment. The war affects and ideas which form the symptoms have, on
-the other hand, a certain intrinsic relation to sexuality inasmuch as
-they are closely bound with the most primitive instincts in man,—those
-connected with the self-preservation instinct. If the sexual affect in
-the last resort originates in the instinct which is directed towards
-the preservation of the species, the affects of anxiety, horror, rage,
-etc. produced by the war are connected with the elementary urging of
-the preservation of the individual, and not, as superficial observers
-imagine, solely for the purpose of preserving the physical existence,
-but above all that of the psychic existence.
-
-The war neuroses are essentially interposed guarantees, the object of
-which is to protect the soldier against a psychosis. Anyone who has
-examined a great number of patients for eighteen months with perception
-that has been analytically sharpened, must recognise that the
-proportionately small number of war psychoses is only to be explained
-by the proportionately large number of war neuroses.
-
-One must have experienced the war occurrences themselves or their
-recapitulation under analytical-cathartic hypnosis in order to
-understand to what attacks the mental life of a man is exposed in time
-of war. For instance, a man after being wounded several times has to
-return to the front, or is separated from important events in his
-family for an indefinite time, or finds himself exposed irretrievably
-to that murderous monster, the tank, or to an enemy gas attack which is
-rolling towards him; again, shot and wounded by shrapnel he has often
-to lie for hours or days among the gory and mutilated bodies of his
-comrades, and, not least of all, his self-respect is sorely tried by
-unjust and cruel superiors who are themselves dominated by complexes,
-yet he has to remain calm and mutely allow himself to be overwhelmed by
-the fact that he has no individual value, but is merely one unimportant
-unit of the whole.
-
-It is now explicable why the war neurosis of the officer does not
-generally exhibit such gross symptoms as that of the ordinary soldier.
-The officer has raised himself above the crowd, and, with a higher
-mental development, has more possibilities of individually sublimating
-his own particular injuries. Nevertheless, the neuroses in officers
-will claim our psycho-therapeutic treatment in a far higher degree
-as soon as our colleagues agree not to look upon them from moral
-standpoints and to consider their comrades of the officer class under
-the courtesy diagnoses of Neurasthenia, Ischia, Neuralgia, etc.
-
-The war neurosis, like the peace neurosis, is the expression of a
-splitting of the personality. The conditions for such a splitting are
-brought about by the consistent narrowing of the personality complex as
-a result of the compulsory discipline and above all by the psychic and
-physical exhaustion of one or more years of war. The soldier severely
-burdened with undischarged mental material is compelled to meet
-abnormally heavy demands. An accident or a disastrous event then causes
-the obstructed personality to break down. Complexes with accentuated
-feelings held down in the unconscious become unduly powerful, and
-the neurosis becomes manifest. The passage from the psychical to the
-physical, however, signifies here more than a self-preserving process
-of the psyche. The act of falling ill is, in my opinion, at the same
-time the commencement of the healing process. The consistent use of
-analytic hypnosis has repeatedly shown that the physical symptoms in
-their mute expression strive to bring to the notice of the man the
-elements that are disturbing his personality and which are imprisoned
-and obstructed in his unconscious. Since the union between conscious
-and unconscious is interrupted within by the strong barrier of the
-resistance, a detour by way of external physical paths is necessary
-in order to re-establish the harmonious fitting together of the
-personality.
-
-If the predominant physical symptoms of the war neuroses are modes of
-expression of unconsciously determined ideas, the more psychic forms
-of these neuroses, the states of inhibition or excitement, are due to
-an effort on the part of the repressed affects to re-establish the
-disturbed psychic balance. A strict demarcation between aetiologically
-effective ideas and sensations is naturally not conceivable. The
-relationship can only be a quantitative one. All ideas obviously stand
-in a quite special relationship to the ego of the patient through their
-accentuation of feelings; on the other hand, the affects are bound to
-their causative ideas.
-
-The first part of our mental analytic therapy is to recognise the
-meaning of the neurotic healing tendency, the second, to convey our
-knowledge to the patient. The crowning point of our treatment consists
-in securing the spontaneous cooperation of the neurotic who, freed of
-his emotional inhibition, and now in harmony with himself, has, through
-his wider mental field of vision, a greater scope for the activity of
-his will power. Man can only desire what he knows. By reason of this
-the analyst comes to realise that the diagnosis, “mala voluntas”, which
-so often brings the doctor who is untrained in analysis into conflict
-with his patient, mostly betokens a “mala potentia” of the doctor who
-knows nothing about the functions of the unconscious.
-
-The weakening of the personality complexes of the soldier, as just
-described, his subjection to other ideas with accentuated feelings
-which are held down in the subconscious and thus connected with the
-constant readiness to subordination under the strivings of ego-hostile
-feelings, represents the so-called morbid suggestibility. To make use
-of this suggestibility for curative purposes without exposing its
-foundations is to increase the illness instead of bringing about a cure.
-
-The neurotic, in my opinion, succumbs in the first instance to
-auto-suggestion, that is to say, to over-strong emotionally toned ideas
-which have arisen in him at a time when the ego-complex is weakened in
-power or completely suspended.
-
-According to my observations, narrowings and suppressions of
-consciousness represent the initial stages of the war neuroses. In the
-smallest loss of consciousness, the shock effects of terror, up to the
-severe fainting attacks and the long continued loss of consciousness
-after being buried, we see the self-conscious of the personality
-more or less obliterated and the way opened to the unconscious. Here
-undoubtedly at the commencement are operating those teleological
-mechanisms which constitute the foundation of the neuroses and their
-formation of symptoms. Consciousness refuses to take up ideas or to
-assimilate at the moment those things which are too horrible in their
-reality to be consciously tolerated. Therefore those psychic shocks,
-those fainting attacks and profound loss of consciousness denote,
-provided there is no injury _in cerebro_, a power of the unconscious
-that attracts to itself the entire psychosis in a salutary manner.
-
-Hypnosis gives us a clear picture of these processes. It shows us the
-patient in the same state of consciousness as that in which during the
-war he had acquired the origin of the illness. During hypnosis the
-soldier relates, or once again lives through, all the things that he
-had experienced in former circumstances only unconsciously. We learn
-of distressing pains of which, when he was buried, he never became
-conscious. In such a hypnosis we see his anxiety displayed, his anger
-arise, feelings which at the moment of the excitation were benumbed and
-like lightning were dragged violently into the unconscious.
-
-I can best illustrate what I have said by a few examples. For instance,
-the simplest cases, which occurred so often, of a flaccid paralysis of
-the arm after a slight gunshot wound that had been well healed for a
-long time and which seemed to be of a purely physical nature, showed
-its unconscious connections very quickly in one sitting. Consciousness
-only knows, “I cannot move my arm”, and no amount of reasoning was of
-any avail. However, the unconscious spoke during hypnosis: “In the
-excitement of the attack my mind became a blank. When I was hit the
-impact of the shrapnel was so great that my arm felt as though it was
-pulled violently backwards, and I immediately thought it was torn off”.
-The correction of the unconscious idea in hypnosis which again united
-the idea of the torn off arm with consciousness here quickly settled
-the question of an organic basis of the symptom, It can be easily
-understood that an arm which is no longer recognised as existing is
-also completely analgesic.
-
-The neurotic symptoms which owe their origin to such suddenly occurring
-events we can consequently regard in their effects as realised
-post-hypnotic auto-suggestions. I have confirmed this view by numerous
-examples, I might mention the case of a soldier who suffered from a
-severe facial tic by which he was constantly making a grimace, and who
-at the same time had a contracture of the right knee joint, both of
-which symptoms had proved quite refractory to the usual treatment by
-suggestion. Hypnosis, which restored the conscious situation of the
-initial blowing up, very soon yielded the following information. While
-the patient lay unconscious under a wreckage of stones and while scenes
-of his native place appeared to him as in a dream, he was constantly
-compelled to make grimaces in order to remove the mass of sand which
-lay on his face and also for the purpose of breathing freely. At
-the same time a sharp stone was pressing on his right heel which
-compelled him to keep his leg bent. This compulsion which was united
-with unconscious ideas acted therefore as a post-hypnotic suggestion
-for more than a year afterwards, until at last the command which
-the unconscious had imposed on the patient could be annulled during
-hypnosis by means of my correction. In this way was the removal of
-these symptoms brought about. I could quote further similar examples in
-which these kinds of contractures represent a compulsory holding of a
-part in a position of ease which is based on unconscious sensations of
-pain.
-
-Apart from repressed physical sensations of pain the affects themselves
-also naturally play an important part in the neurotic compulsion to
-maintain a particular position, I remember a soldier who for several
-months had a compulsion to keep both eyes fixed and turned upwards and
-to the left. This symptom failed to react to methods of suggestion.
-Analysis under hypnosis within a few minutes gave the explanation and
-at the same time the removal of the symptom. The patient had anxiously
-expected the falling down of trunks of trees from above and to the
-left through the bursting of shells during a drum fire. His eyes
-became fixed in dread before the fate threatening him. The original
-situation had in the meantime become unreal, nevertheless the anxiety
-in itself was valid. The patient was still a soldier and retained
-in his neurosis the anxiety—an anxiety of similar situations. The
-neurosis of another soldier, which for a long time had been considered
-of an organic nature, a bulbar paralysis being suspected, was very
-instructive and the success of the treatment most gratifying. This man
-in addition to an apparently harmless superficial gunshot wound of the
-back suffered from a spasm of the muscles of the throat, a dysphagia,
-that made it impossible for him to take solid food, while liquid
-food was only possible in small quantities. The spasm of the throat
-and muscles of mastication turned out to be “suppressed rage”. This
-soldier who was cut off when on patrol was stealing alone through a
-wood when he saw a comrade being ill-treated by Frenchmen on the main
-road. This scene he reproduced fully and dramatically under hypnosis
-in which he stealthily crawled about, ground his teeth together and
-gnashed them in impotent rage over the scene which he had witnessed.
-At that time he was struck in the back by a chance shot which caused
-him to faint for a short time. He then succeeded in getting back to his
-company and was sent into hospital on account of his superficial wound.
-The living through this scene again with its accompanying emotions
-completely freed him from his dysphagia. This example also shows how
-repressed rage manifests itself as a more positive feeling tone through
-physical increase of tonus in contrast to the previously described
-cases with negative and depressed accentuation of feelings which are
-physically represented by a lowering of tone and in flaccid paralyses.
-Here an opportunity may be taken of alluding to the fact that one can
-demonstrate without difficulty during hypnosis the displacement from
-the psychical into the physical. If we interrupt the patient in the
-abreaction of his rage during hypnosis then he reacts with a general
-tremor or the tremor of an extremity which is already in some way
-psychically affected.
-
-Further I might mention the case of a neurotic who suffered from a
-shaking tremor of the right arm with peculiar circular movements of the
-thumb and fore-finger. This tremor had been removed by pure suggestive
-methods, but one morning it returned, as the patient expressed it “by
-itself”. On closer questioning he remembered that the shaking had
-re-appeared in conjunction with a terrifying dream during the previous
-night; the actual content of the dream he had forgotten. During
-hypnosis the patient immediately became conscious again of the dream,
-and by means of it of those events which still compelled him to shake
-his arm. During the night he had dreamed of a Russian with a black
-beard who sprang on to his bed in order to strangle him. He awoke in
-anxiety and terror with his arm shaking. The patient had seen the face
-of this Russian appear over the parapet during a furious hand grenade
-fight just when he was on the point of fixing a grenade fuse and was
-suddenly blown over. He lost consciousness with his rage undischarged
-and an incipient movement which served as a mimic abreaction of this
-anger.
-
-From this example, to which I could add many more, it becomes evident
-that dream material directly forces itself on the attention of the
-intelligent psycho-therapeutists as of great assistance in the
-treatment of war neuroses.
-
-I do not treat any patients whose dreams I do not know. I have learnt
-for a long time now to estimate the dreams of my war neurotic patients
-as an attempt at self-healing, especially in the psycho-cathartic
-sense. I never give drugs for the dreams of anxiety, terror and rage. I
-am glad of the cooperation of the patient, I learn by listening to his
-dreams his own tendency to cure, then I get him to continue the dream
-under hypnosis where it has stopped the previous night, or, this I have
-several times found successful, I cause the patient to continue in his
-dreams at night from where the hypnosis has left off. Incidentally it
-may be remarked that after all these experiences I look upon hypnosis
-not as an artificial sleep but as a definite stage of natural sleep,
-which by virtue of its artificial induction enables one to maintain a
-direct rapport with the sleeper.
-
-The initial stage of auto-hypnosis, hypnosis, and dreams represents the
-same _niveau_ as that in which the germs of the illness lie embedded
-and can be removed.
-
-In corroboration of this view I might mention a patient who was in
-a stuporose condition, with paralysis of all the limbs, and who was
-also almost deaf and dumb. By means of suggestion _en masse_, _i.e_.
-when lying down among other patients who were being hypnotised, it at
-length became possible to hypnotise him. Even then the patient remained
-completely stuporose. Only when his sister succeeded in getting from
-him a few words concerning an anxiety dream, and after I had repeated
-these words to him during hypnosis did marked excitation take place in
-the stuporose man. The unconscious became sensitised and with effective
-discharge came the recapitulation of the causative occurrence. The
-patient having been forced by some jealous and stronger companions to
-drag along some branches of trees was overturned into a mass of mud in
-which he threatened to suffocate. The subconscious idea was that his
-mouth and ears were filled with mud and his limbs pressed into it.
-During hypnosis he cleared away this imaginary mud with all his might.
-
-There are, on the other hand, patients who inversely take over the
-impulse for curative discharge from the hypnosis into the dream. A
-young lieutenant assisted thus very practically in the reduction of
-his pent-up affects. For weeks after being blown up he was mentally
-deranged and delirious, and still suffered from states of excitement
-being unable to carry out the simplest intellectual processes, such as
-counting, reading, etc. After the first hypnosis which brought about
-a recapitulation of the most recent occurrences with a corresponding
-discharge of affect, there followed an intense fury dream. The patient
-wrenched out several iron bars from his bed and battered the wall with
-them. In the dream he was striking a canal worker with them whom he
-had seen daily from the window of the hospital. The conversation next
-morning showed that the canal worker had the features of an orderly who
-had wanted to detain him in the field hospital and thus prevent him
-going back to the front to avenge his brother. The patient’s brother
-had recently been killed whilst serving in the same regiment, and the
-lieutenant had been fighting with fury and grief in order to avenge
-him when he was blown up. His first delirious attack had been directed
-against this particular orderly.
-
-Sometimes one succeeded in directly stimulating the self-treatment of
-the patient in the dream. I recollect a neurotic who suffered from
-a severe disturbance of speech and also of walking, the result of a
-spastic paralysis of the legs and muscles of the mouth in consequence
-of a strong repression of rage. The discharge which took place
-under hypnosis was so dangerous to those in the vicinity that I had
-prematurely to break off the treatment. However, before waking the
-patient I told him to discharge the unreleased part in his dream. I
-let him sleep alone with an orderly. In the middle of the night he
-sprang up and again lived through an experience of anxiety and rage
-accompanied with shouting and raving, and although previously paralysed
-he ran down the whole length of the staircase of the hospital.
-
-An especially frequent symptom in the war neuroses—the convulsive
-attacks—directly represents, in my opinion, an auto-hypnotic state
-appearing in the form of an attack.
-
-Being buried (as the result of an explosion) with its total
-obliteration of the conscious ego, naturally the most frequent
-originator of the war neuroses, acts most often as the first cause. The
-loss of consciousness during the convulsive attack and the subsequent
-amnesia is that beneficent not-knowing into which the neurotic person
-flies before the memory of that all too horrible situation, or before
-the knowledge of some act of his own which he may have to perform as
-a result of his affective damming-up, but which nevertheless brings
-him into grave danger. I have already in my earlier work alluded to
-the fact that the physical form of expression of the convulsion varies
-according to its unconscious symbolic meaning. The most frequent form
-of the convulsion simply represents a repetition of those defence
-movements which the patient made when he was threatened with being
-shattered when he was buried. The convulsive attacks always take
-place when the ideas regarding those events are subconscious, and the
-strongly repressed affects which are bound to them, are associatively
-stimulated. A door slammed, a thunder-clap, a distant shot, makes
-the patient break down, and his previously unconscious anxiety idea
-becomes over-weighted. Terror and dread of death here generally form
-the primary basis for the dissociation of the psyche and for the
-attack-like mastery of the conscious by the unconscious.
-
-A soldier who has once been paralysed for a time through the emotion of
-terror in his conscious ego is in many ways no longer in the position
-to satisfy consciously the repression which the pressure of discipline
-demands. It is almost always the anger towards his superiors which
-brings on further convulsive attacks. During hypnosis, which lifts
-the curtain of this originally hallucinated dream-action during the
-attack, we see again and again the patient struggling with his highest
-superiors. He strikes, bites, stabs and shoots them, treads them under
-foot with terrible oaths. He here lets free the fiercest instincts
-against persons who restrained his conscious ego.
-
-It is quite explicable why these kinds of attacks before they come for
-treatment are often associated with mutism. The patient denies himself
-in a certain degree the faculty of speech, because he is afraid of
-speaking certain words that might bring misfortune upon him.
-
-In one case I succeeded even without hypnosis in directly making use
-of the convulsive attacks of the patient for treatment. I was able to
-become _en rapport_ with the patient in the attack so that he informed
-me about the events which he actually hallucinated during the single
-convulsive attack.
-
-The sphere of the purely psychic war injuries without any physical
-signs which can be treated in this way is also great. I mentioned
-above a case of stupor. It is quite comprehensible that it is more
-particularly the mental inhibitory phenomena which are accessible to
-this treatment, because the cessation of mental processes is brought
-about through an accumulation of affect which entirely owes its origin
-to definite war occurrences. The psycho-catharsis as a foundation for a
-further analytic treatment here works wonders.
-
-I will take this opportunity of mentioning that as regards the war
-neurotic an abreaction by means of words is mostly not sufficient in
-this compressed form of treatment. The soldier is under the suggestion
-of the deed “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. His overburdened
-subconscious now is freed by means of an acted abreaction. On account
-of this I have for a long time proceeded to construct an upholstered
-dummy against which the neurotic fighting in his primitive human
-instinct victoriously frees himself.
-
-The neuroses of anxiety and terror, so far as they have become manifest
-through war experiences, can be treated successfully. Nevertheless, it
-is to be noted that also in the feeling of guilt of the war neurotic
-not only are real, specific and complex conditioned war atrocities
-the inner kernel, but that things experienced only in phantasy may be
-important.
-
-One of the most frequent war psycho-neurotic symptoms represents what
-after all is comprehensible without anything further, loss of memory.
-It may extend over a limited period of the war or over the whole of
-it, or even into pre-war times. The whole memory is blotted out in
-order that definite things should not be brought to mind. When these
-have once become conscious by means of the dream or hypnosis, and are
-pondered over, the tendency of the unconscious is robbed of its objects
-and the memory is again automatically re-introduced.
-
-The frequent loss of other intellectual capabilities likewise is
-mostly made good after sufficient discharge of affect. It is easy to
-understand that just those capabilities which represent the person’s
-highest art of sublimation, like artistic ones, would particularly
-suffer through the war experiences. Thus, a not unknown painter when
-a recruit in the war lost his ability for colour perception. My
-suggestion during hypnosis that he should at night dream in a picture
-the subconscious circumstances of his illness and then sketch it next
-day he promptly carried out and therewith contributed to the removal of
-a symptom which meant so much to him.
-
-Regarding the condition of excitement and frenzy which I have had
-ample opportunity of treating, I need say nothing further after what
-has been said concerning the convulsive attacks. They represent
-the positive side to the negative one of the convulsions. They are
-evoked by association and refer in the direction of their affects to
-definite persons or events that in a characteristic manner have more
-or less been forgotten by the patients. The nature of the associative
-production often enables one to recognise the typical neurotic
-displacement, a projection outwards. There are numerous patients
-of this kind who readily have an attack of rage at the sight of an
-officer’s shoulder knot or a doctor’s overall, because they once had
-had to repress their rage against a definite officer or doctor by
-whom they had psychically felt themselves ill-used. A word further
-concerning the psychic illness of the genuine pension neurosis. Here
-again the interpretation of dreams particularly during hypnosis enables
-us to decide whether we are dealing with a genuine war psycho-neurosis
-or the frequently falsely accused conscious “ideas of covetousness”.
-I have found that the real pension neurosis represents a kind of
-inferiority neurosis. The patient values himself higher than he feels
-he is valued by his environment. He has generally, in his opinion,
-performed some special military achievement. He has counted on a
-distinction or at least a certain promotion which he does not attain.
-An illness or wound finally raises him above the general mass of the
-unknown, and now the pension is the substitute for the missing iron
-cross or the lance corporal’s button with which the patient endeavours
-to prove his particular value in opposition to the state.
-
-It can be understood that relapses occur in what is on the whole
-a comparatively hasty treatment. However, with the help of the
-pure analytic method described the character of the relapse can be
-established without difficulty. Frequently it is solely a question of
-the patients getting into the old surroundings through re-employment by
-the military to which they are not psychically equal, and from which
-they have escaped with the help of their neurosis, and now they in
-defence react with a relapse.
-
-On the other hand, it can frequently be established that the treatment
-on account of its shortness has not removed all the unconscious
-material. I might mention as an example a soldier who had suffered
-from states of excitement and convulsive attacks. After two treatments
-the states of excitement disappeared and within four weeks the attacks
-had ceased. The patient had to be discharged in spite of the fact that
-he still seemed somewhat distressed. After a few months he came back
-into the hospital on account of a recurrence of the attacks. In the
-treatment carried out when he had first been admitted into the hospital
-only those things came to light which were connected with his being
-blown up. During hypnosis on his second admission the patient said
-that he still had the feeling as though “someone was behind him”. This
-feeling of anxiety often increased so terribly that he would have a
-convulsive attack. In this attack he constantly saw a dead Russian in
-a white shirt who threateningly demanded back a gold ring which the
-patient had taken from the Russian after killing him. This occurrence
-the patient had completely forgotten, but after I had talked it over
-with him when he was awake he became changed, alert and keen to work,
-and was now permanently cured of his convulsions.
-
-These theoretical points which I have supported by means of
-practical examples will suffice for a primary representation of the
-symptomatology of the war neuroses. It is impossible within the compass
-of this contribution, with the abundance of material at my disposal, to
-represent the numerous forms of the neuroses not mentioned here, and
-still further as regards their unconscious conditionality.
-
-In conclusion I should like to give a short description of the neurosis
-of a young civil servant, which despite the brevity of the treatment
-revealed with classical clearness a modified picture of the nature of
-the neurotic predisposition and the actual outbreak of the illness.
-
-This illness, when looked at from the outside, seemed to be a complete
-war neurosis without any kind of “civilian” origin. The patient had
-been for a long time in the field and constantly in the front line and
-had been exposed to extraordinary hardships. He had been wounded and
-only fell ill with his neurosis after being blown up twice. He had a
-severe impediment in his speech in consequence of an almost complete
-intention spasm of his lips, combined with states of excitement and
-rage, and attacks of loss of consciousness. The first conversation
-showed that all the physical disabilities signified nothing to the
-patient, on the contrary, he was completely broken down in mind and
-body through his struggles and friction with his superiors. In the
-first dream the patient received a letter, which to his unbounded rage
-his father had already opened, so that the red lining to the envelope
-hung in shreds. In the hypnosis the patient during the reading aloud
-of this dream underwent an extraordinary state of excitation, in which
-he re-experienced his last blowing up with unspeakable anxiety and
-terror. The red envelope lining was the torn out jaw bone of a dear
-friend and comrade who had been shattered beside him at that explosion.
-His relation to his father came out, with anger at the thought that he
-(the father) did not esteem all the great performances which he had
-accomplished in the field and communicated to him. The next dream after
-this hypnosis brought up a scene between the father and son. The father
-in the robe of the public prosecutor forbade his son, according to the
-law, to speak with some women imprisoned and kept in an underground
-dungeon. The son started up in anger and said that he had his own law
-book which lay by one of those women. He went to get it and wandered
-through underground passages. He found in several rooms earlier loved
-women, but not his law book. At last he came into the last room and on
-the threshold his mother met him in her nightdress.
-
-I do not think I need to add many words to this audience to arrive at
-the interpretation. The patient fulfilled his “law” when he volunteered
-for the war, in order to put himself over his father through his
-manliness and obtain his mother. The symbol of the envelope, which,
-destined for the son, was unjustly opened by the father, is clear in
-its significance. It is peculiar and interesting how in this letter,
-which contained for the patient the secret of his life, is shown in
-combined representation the uninterrupted connection of the origin and
-outbreak of the neurosis—from the female genitals to the corpse of the
-shattered friend, to the memory of the last complete breakdown of the
-ego through the explosion.
-
-I have come to the end of my remarks, and hope that I have proved that
-the combined psycho-analytical method gives us to-day a true medical
-treatment for war neurotics. Those doctors who have devised a system
-of tortures, such as hunger cures, dark rooms, prohibition of letters,
-painful electric currents, etc. in order to extort from the patients
-the abandonment of their neurotic symptoms, unconsciously recognise the
-Freudian theory by the inversion of its fundamental principles. They
-make a torture of the treatment in order to force the neurotic “to flee
-into health”. The doctor schooled in psycho-analysis does not need to
-hound in the opposite direction his patients who have been driven into
-illness. He releases him from the fetters of his unconscious mind and
-thus is in the position to guide the neurotic into health and save him.
-
-
-
-
-III.
-
-WAR SHOCK AND FREUD’S THEORY OF THE NEUROSES[7]
-
-By
-
-DR. ERNEST JONES, London.
-
-
-A matter that used to hamper the opponents of psycho-analysis to
-some extent was that there was no alternative theory of the neuroses
-seriously tenable. It was clearly impossible to explain all neurotic
-manifestations by the catch-word use of the two terms “heredity” and
-“suggestion”, for our conceptions of heredity, however important
-in this connection they may well become in the future when more is
-known of the subject, are at present too vague to explain any complex
-psychological phenomena, and the idea of suggestion merely introduces
-yet another problem without solving any of the old ones.
-
-The experience of neurotic affections engendered by the war, however,
-has enabled the critics of psycho-analysis to put forward the view
-that the factors invoked by Freud in explanation of these affections
-need not be present, and therefore cannot be regarded as essential,
-in the way maintained by him, whereas, on the other hand, a different
-set of factors is undeniably present and operative; not only so, but
-these latter factors are held to be all-sufficing, so that it is not
-necessary to search for any others in the ætiology of the conditions in
-question. Some opponents of psycho-analysis, particularly those more
-concerned with combating an unwelcome theory than with ascertaining
-truth, have even maintained that the experience of the war has proved
-_all_ Freud’s views to be utterly untenable and false.
-
-It would be easy to criticise the standpoint thus adopted, though
-that is in no sense my purpose here. Two points alone may be raised.
-If, as some writers assert, the strain of war conditions is in itself
-sufficient to account for the development of a psychoneurosis without
-the introduction of any other factor, then how is one to explain the
-actual incidence of war neuroses? Neurotic symptoms amounting to a
-definite clinico-pathological condition are by no means so common as
-is sometimes stated. I do not know of any statistics on the matter,
-but I should be surprised to hear that more than 2 per cent. of the
-Army serving in France are affected in this way. This consideration
-in itself shews that some other factors than war strain must be
-involved, factors relating to the previous disposition of the men
-affected, and the problem is to determine what these are. In the
-second place, as to the dogmatic assertion that Freud’s theory of the
-psychoneuroses cannot apply to those arising under war conditions.
-An essential feature of this theory is that psychoneuroses result
-from unconscious mental conflicts. To ascertain whether these are
-operative in a given case, therefore, it is obviously necessary to
-employ some method, such as psycho-analysis, which gives access to
-the unconscious. It may, I think, be taken as certain that those who
-deny the action of these conflicts in either the war neuroses or in
-what, by way of contradistinction, must be called the peace neuroses,
-have not thought it necessary to use any such method, and they thus
-place themselves in a position very similar to that of a writer who
-would on _a priori_ grounds deny the details or even the existence of
-histology without ever having looked through a microscope, the only
-avenue to histology. I choose this simile because it seems to me that
-the relation of psycho-analysis to clinical psychiatry is not at all
-inaptly described[8] as being like that of histology to anatomy. Or
-one might draw an analogy from a strictly medical field. If some one
-were to take a series of cases of tuberculosis supervening on measles
-or typhoid, and then maintain that because this ætiological factor was
-present therefore no microorganism could be, so that Koch’s views as to
-the causation of tuberculosis were entirely unfounded, one would surely
-have the right to ask whether any search for the bacillus had been made
-in the cases in question, and to satisfy oneself that the observer had
-grasped the difference between essential and merely exciting causes of
-disease. If the answer to both these inquiries were in the negative,
-I think it will be agreed that no great weight would be attached to
-the claim that Koch’s theory of the nature of tuberculosis had been
-demolished. Yet this is precisely the order of scientific thinking
-evinced by those who maintain that Freud’s theory of the neuroses
-has been demolished by the simple observation that they may manifest
-themselves under the stress of warfare.
-
-I do not mean, however, to assert the contrary of this
-proposition—namely, that the validity of Freud’s theory has been
-proved in the case of war neuroses, as I should maintain it has been
-in the case of peace neuroses. I simply hold that the matter is at
-present _sub judice_, and must remain so until sufficiently extensive
-investigations shall have settled the question one way or the other. It
-so happens that the traumatic neuroses are the field in psychopathology
-that has hitherto been the least explored by psycho-analysis even in
-peace time, while the opportunity of psycho-analytic investigation of
-the war neuroses has, in this country at least, been so meagre that
-the time is not ripe for any generalisation on the subject. Personally
-I have examined a considerable number of cases in the cursory way
-that is usual in hospital work, but I have been able to make an
-intensive study in only some half-dozen cases, and I do not know of
-any other cases that have been investigated by the psycho-analytic
-method. In spite of this paucity of material, a feature inherent in
-intensive work, the critic of psycho-analysis may legitimately demand
-of the analyst, who advances considerable pretensions in regard to
-understanding the pathology of neurotic affections in general, that he
-should be able to formulate some tentative conception of the relation
-between the phenomena commonly observed in the war neuroses and the
-psycho-analytical theory. In the following remarks an attempt will
-be made to meet this demand, although, as has just been explained,
-there can be no question of solving the numerous and as yet unstudied
-problems raised by the observations made in connection with war shock.
-
-It is desirable in the first place to clear away some general
-misconceptions on the subject. The task of assimilating our new
-experiences in connection with the war with any previously held theory
-of neurotic affections has undoubtedly been rendered more difficult by
-the attitude of those workers whose interest in such problems is of
-contemporary origin. They lay much too much emphasis on the newer and
-perhaps more sensational aspects of the phenomena observed, instead
-of trying to correlate the more familiar and better understood ones.
-This attitude has been so pronounced with some writers that one
-might almost imagine that before the war there had never been such
-calamities as wrecks, earthquakes, and railway accidents, and that men
-had never been tried to the limit of their endurance with privation,
-fatigue, and danger, while familiar symptoms like hysterical blindness
-and paralysis are thought worthy of detailed description and are
-treated almost as novelties in psychological medicine. So far as I
-know, however, although some symptoms—e.g., dread of shells—assume a
-form that is coloured by war experiences, no symptom, and hardly any
-grouping of symptoms, occurs in war neuroses that is not to be met
-with in the neuroses of peace, a fact which in itself would suggest
-that fundamentally very similar agents must be at work to produce the
-neurosis in both cases.
-
-Another very prevalent misconception, one strengthened by the official
-use of that unfortunate catch-word “shell-shock”, is that war neuroses
-constitute a more or less unitary syndrome. It is so often forgotten
-that the term “shell-shock” can only mean, and no doubt was originally
-intended to mean, a certain ætiological factor, and not the disease
-itself. I have preferred to use the less ambiguous and more obviously
-ætiological term “war-shock,” one coined, I think, by Eder[9]. Even
-when the term “shell-shock” is avoided, its place is usually taken
-by the all-embracing expression “neurasthenia”—in most cases, in
-fact, where there are no physical symptoms of hysteria present. True
-neurasthenia in its strict sense, on the contrary, is a relatively rare
-complaint, certainly in anything like a pure form; I have not come
-across a single case myself in connection with the war. The results
-of war strain are anything but unitary; most of the diverse forms of
-neurosis and psychoneurosis are found to be represented, and until
-these are adequately distinguished one from another it is impossible to
-make any satisfactory study of their individual pathology. A further
-point still more often overlooked, and perhaps even more important,
-is that not only are the results diverse, but the ætiological factors
-concerned in war strain are much more complex than is sometimes
-realised. Careful study of the cases shews that what was the most
-important pathogenetic agent with one patient had nothing to do with
-the neurosis of a second patient, although he may have been equally
-exposed to its influence. For instance, the sight of a near friend
-being killed may have greatly affected one soldier and been closely
-related to his subsequent neurosis, whereas with a second patient who
-has gone through the same experience there may be no connection between
-it and _his_ neurosis; the same applies to the other painful features
-of warfare, the tension of waiting under shell fire, the experience
-of being buried alive, and so on. These considerations indicate the
-great importance of the individual factor predisposing to particular
-neurotic reactions, and point to the necessity for careful dissection
-of the various pathogenetic factors in a number of cases before making
-generalisations as to the way in which the numerous separate influences
-grouped together as war strain may operate.
-
-Coming now to the points of contact between war experience and Freud’s
-theory, one may remark, to begin with, how well the facts of the war
-itself accord with Freud’s view of the human mind as containing beneath
-the surface a body of imperfectly controlled and explosive forces
-which in their nature conflict with the standards of civilisation.
-Indeed, one may say that war is an official abrogation of civilised
-standards. The manhood of a nation is in war not only allowed, but
-encouraged and ordered to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is
-throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind, to commit deeds and
-witness sights that are profoundly revolting to our æsthetic and moral
-disposition. All sorts of previously forbidden and buried impulses,
-cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater activity,
-and the old intrapsychical conflicts, which, according to Freud, are
-the essential cause of all neurotic disorders, and which had been dealt
-with before by means of “repression” of one side of the conflict, are
-now reinforced, and the person compelled to deal with them afresh under
-totally different circumstances.
-
-It is plain, as MacCurdy has well pointed out[10], that men entering
-the Army, and particularly on approaching the battle-field, have to
-undergo a very considerable readjustment of their previous attitudes of
-mind and standards of conduct, a readjustment which is much greater in
-the case of some men than in that of others, and also one which some
-men find it much more easy to accomplish satisfactorily than do others.
-The man’s previous standards of general morality, of cleanliness and
-æsthetic feeling, and of his relation to his fellow-man, have all to
-undergo a very considerable alteration. In all directions he has to
-do things that previously were repugnant to his strongest ideals.
-These ideals are ascribed by some—e.g., Trotter[11], and, following
-him, MacCurdy—to the operation of the herd instinct, in other words to
-the influence of the social _milieu_ in which he may happen to have
-been brought up. I think personally that behind this influence there
-are still deeper factors at work of a more individual order, derived
-essentially from hereditary tendencies and the earliest relation of the
-child to its parents. However this may be, it is certain that every one
-has such ideals, though he may not describe them under this name, and
-that in the course of development he insensibly builds up a series of
-standards of which his ego approves—and which I therefore propose to
-refer to by Freud’s term of the “ego ideal”—together with a contrasting
-series of which his ego disapproves.
-
-As every student of genetic psychology knows, this gradual building
-up is never performed smoothly, but always after a number of both
-conscious and unconscious internal conflicts between the conscious
-ego on the one side and various impulses and desires on the other,
-after a series of partial renunciations and compromises. Further, it
-is exceptional for the whole result to be satisfactory; there always
-remain certain fields—more especially in the realm of sex—where the
-resolution of the conflict is an imperfect one, and it is just from
-this imperfect resolution that, according to Freud, neurotic affections
-arise. The question whether a neurosis will result in a given case
-is essentially a quantitative one. The mind has the capacity of
-tolerating without harm a certain amount of stimulation from these
-internal impulses and desires that are not in unison with the ego,
-and when this limit is passed the energy derived from them flows over
-into neurotic manifestations. The mind has several methods for dealing
-with the energy of the anti-ego impulses successfully—that is to say,
-without the impairment of mental health—and it is only when these
-methods are inadequate to deal with the whole that neurosis ensues.
-Two of these methods may especially be noted. One is the deflection
-of the energy in question from its primitive and forbidden goal to
-another one in harmony with the more social standards of the ego; as
-every schoolmaster knows, sport is an excellent example of this. When
-the primitive goal was a sexual one, this process of deflection, here
-on to a non-sexual goal, has been given the name of “sublimation”,
-but there are similar refining and modifying processes at work in
-connection with all anti-ego impulses—e.g., cruelty. A second method
-is to keep the energy in a state of repression in the unconscious,
-the conscious mind refusing to deal directly with it and guarding
-itself against its influence by erecting a dam or barrier against
-it, known as a reaction-formation. Thus in the case of primitive
-cruelty, a cruel child may develop into a person to whom the very idea
-of inflicting cruelty is alien and abhorrent, the original impulse
-having been quite split off from the ego into the unconscious, and
-its place taken in consciousness by the reaction-formation barrier of
-horror and sensitiveness to pain and suffering. In such ways as these
-a state of practical equilibrium is attained in the normal, the power
-of the ego-ideal having proved sufficient either to utilise for its
-own purposes (by means of modifying) or to keep at bay, the impulses
-and desires that are out of harmony with it. In some people the state
-of equilibrium thus attained is of considerable stability, they have
-what is popularly called a reserve of mental and moral force with
-which they can meet disappointments, difficulties, and emergencies of
-various kinds in life, which means in practice that their capacity for
-readjustment to radically new situations is fairly elastic.
-
-Now, on approaching the field of war the readjustment necessary is one
-of the more difficult ones experienced in life, although it is by no
-means so difficult as can arise in various situations appertaining
-to the field of sex. It is an adjustment which practice shews is
-possible to the large majority of men, but there is no doubt that the
-success with which it is carried out is extremely variable in different
-people; and it probably varies in the same person from time to time
-for either internal reasons or for external reasons relating to the
-precise environment at the moment, to the precise war experiences
-through which they may be passing. It is further clear that the
-readjustment is likely to vary in its success almost entirely with
-the success with which the earlier adjustments were made during the
-development of the individual. This statement is meant to carry more
-than its obvious meaning that the more stable a man is the more surely
-can he meet the problems and difficulties of warfare; it has a deeper
-implication. Namely, there is an important relationship between the
-two phases of difficult adjustment, the current one and the older
-one. Fundamentally it is the same difficulty, the same conflict; it
-is only the form that is different. Let us suppose, for instance,
-that the original difficulty in adjustment was over the matter of
-cruelty, that in childhood the conflict between strong tendencies of
-this kind and perhaps specially strong ideals of the contrary sort was
-an exceptionally sharp one, so that it was never very satisfactorily
-resolved, though a working equilibrium may have been established on the
-basis of powerful reaction-formations and various protective devices
-for avoiding in every possible way contact with the subject of cruelty.
-Such a man may well have unusual difficulty in adapting himself to
-the cruel aspects of war, which really means that his long-buried and
-quite unconscious impulses to cruelty, impulses the very possibility of
-whose existence he would repudiate with horror, are stimulated afresh
-by the unavoidable sights and deeds of war. In bayonet practice, for
-instance, the man is taught how best to inflict horrible injuries, and
-he is encouraged to indulge in activities of this order from the very
-thought of which he has all his life been trying to escape. He now has
-to deal afresh with the old internal conflict between the two sides of
-his nature, with the added complication that there has to take place
-an extensive revaluation of his previous standards, and in important
-respects an actual reversal of them. He has to formulate new rules of
-conduct, to adopt new attitudes of mind, and to accustom himself to the
-idea that tendencies of which he had previously disapproved with the
-whole strength of his ego-ideal are now permissible and laudatory under
-certain conditions. One would get a very erroneous view of the picture
-I am trying to draw if one imagined that the process of readjustment
-in question goes on in the person’s consciousness. This is never
-entirely true, and often not at all true; the most important part of
-the readjustment, and often the whole of it, is quite unconscious.
-We thus see that to obtain a proper understanding of the problems
-of an individual case, and to be able to deal with them practically
-in therapeutics, it is often necessary to appreciate the relation
-between a current conflict and an older one, for the real strength and
-importance of the current one is often due to the fact that it has
-aroused buried and imperfectly controlled older ones.
-
-I have taken the one instance of cruelty, but there are many others
-in connection with warfare. It may, indeed, be said in general that
-the process of re-adaptation in regard to war consists of two distinct
-sides: on the one hand, war effects an extensive release of previously
-tabooed tendencies, a release shewn in endless ways—for instance, even
-in the language of camps; and on the other hand the acquiring of a
-strict discipline and self-control along lines widely different from
-those of peace-times. The one is a correlative of the other, and we
-have perhaps in these considerations a psychological explanation of the
-feature of military life that is so puzzling to most civilians—namely,
-the extraordinary punctiliousness that a rigid discipline attaches to
-matters which to the outsider appear so trivial. An indisciplined army
-has always been the bane of commanders, and perhaps the risks attaching
-to indiscipline are related to the release of imperfectly controlled
-impulses that war deliberately effects.
-
-The way in which a relative failure in war adaptation may lead to a
-neurosis can be illustrated by a parallel drawn from the more familiar
-problems of peace neuroses. Imagine a young woman who has never been
-able to reconcile the sexual sides of her nature with her ego ideal,
-and whose only way of dealing with that aspect of life has been to
-keep it at as great a distance from her consciousness as possible. If
-now she gets married, it may happen that she will find it impossible
-to effect the necessary reconciliation, and that, being deprived of
-the _modus vivendi_—namely, the keeping sexuality at a distance—which
-previously made it possible to maintain a mental equilibrium, she
-develops a neurosis in which the repressed sexual desires achieve a
-symbolic and disguised expression. Similarly in a war neurosis when
-the old adjustment between the ego-ideal and the repressed impulses is
-taken away, it may prove impossible to establish a fresh one on the new
-conditions, and then the repressed impulses will find expression in
-some form of neurotic symptom.
-
-So far as I can judge, the specific problems characteristic of the war
-neuroses are to be found in connection with two broad groups of mental
-processes. One of these relates to the question of war adaptation
-considered above, the other to that of fear. The latter is hardly to
-be regarded as a sub-group of the former, inasmuch as there is no
-readjustment or transvaluation of values concerned, as there typically
-is with the former. The moral attitude towards fear, and the conflicts
-arising in connection with it, remain the same in war as in peace.
-In both cases it is considered a moral weakness to display or be
-influenced by fear, and especially to give in to it at the cost of
-not doing one’s duty. The soldier who would like to escape from shell
-fire is, so far as moral values are concerned, in the same position as
-a man in peace-time who will not venture his life to save a drowning
-child. Indeed, the conflict cannot be as sharp in the case of the
-soldier, for he would find very widespread and thorough sympathy for
-his quite comprehensible desire, and there would be much less social
-blame or guilt attaching to him than to the man in the other situation
-mentioned. So that the problem of fear, which we all agree plays a
-central part in connection with the typical war neuroses, seems to be
-apart from that of war adaptation in general as expounded above.
-
-Before discussing the problem of fear, however, I should like at this
-point to review the position and see how far we have got in the attempt
-to approximate the facts of war neuroses to the psycho-analytical
-theory. This theory of the neuroses is a very elaborate one, including
-many problems of unconscious mechanisms, distinctions between the
-predispositions and mechanisms characteristic of the different
-neuroses, and so on, but it is possible to formulate the main
-principles of it along fairly simple lines, and I now propose to do
-this in a series of statements.
-
-(1) The first principle in Freud’s theory of neurotic symptoms is
-that they are of volitional origin. This principle, long suspected by
-both the medical and the lay public, and the real reason why in the
-past they have been so confounded with malingering, would be at once
-evident were it not for the fact that it is not true of volition in
-the ordinary sense of conscious deliberate voluntary purpose. In other
-words, it is not true of the will as a whole, but only of a part of
-it—namely, a part that the patient is not aware of. Thus, neuroses
-are not diseases or accidents that happen to a person, as the French
-school of psychopathology maintains, but are phenomena produced and
-brought about by some tendency in the person’s mind, and for specific
-purposes. Freud distinguishes three classes of motives that operate in
-this way, one essential, the other two not. The indispensable one is an
-unconscious desire to obtain pleasure by gratifying in the imagination
-some repressed and dissociated impulse, a motive, therefore, arising
-in the part of the mind that is not in harmony with the ego-ideal. A
-second motive is to achieve some end in the outer world; for instance
-sympathy from an unkind husband, which the person finds easier to do
-by means of a neurosis than in other ways. The third set of motives
-has the same purpose as the last, but may be distinguished from it
-in that they concern the making use of an already existing neurosis
-rather than the helping to bring one about. Both the latter sets
-are usually, but not always, unconscious: more strictly, they are
-preconscious—that is, they do not relate to deeply buried tendencies,
-and so are correspondingly easy to reveal; Freud terms them the primary
-and secondary “gain of illness” respectively. Now I take it that this
-principle of volitional origin is no longer very widely questioned by
-modern psychopathologists, and in the case of war neuroses the main
-motives are visible and comprehensible enough—namely, the desire to
-find some good reason for escaping from the horrors of warfare.
-
-(2) The second principle is that all neurotic symptoms are the
-product of an intrapsychical conflict which the person has failed
-satisfactorily to resolve, and that they constitute a compromise
-formation between the two conflicting forces. Here, again, I think that
-those who have been investigating the psychology of war neuroses will
-agree with this principle. MacCurdy,[12] in particular, has described
-in great detail the conflict that arises in soldiers between, on the
-one hand, the motives actuating to continuance at duty and concealment
-of growing sense of incapacity and apprehension, and, on the other, the
-awful sense of failure accompanying the sometimes almost overwhelming
-desire to escape from the horrors of their position. The neurosis
-offers a way out of this dilemma, the only way that the particular
-person is able to find, and the actual symptoms, which are often
-grossly incapacitating, such as blindness, represent the fulfilment
-of the desire against which the man has been fighting. We reach,
-therefore, the wish-fulfilment part of Freud’s theory.
-
-(3) The third principle is that the operative wish that leads to the
-creation of the neurosis is an unconscious one. Freud means this in
-the full sense of the word, and in this sense the principle has not
-yet been confirmed from the experience of the war neuroses. There are,
-however, different degrees of unconsciousness of a mental process,
-and the important point to Freud is not so much the degree of the
-unawareness in itself—this being largely an index of the repression—as
-the repression or dissociation that has led to the unawareness. What
-he maintains is that the wish producing the neurosis is one that is
-not in harmony with the ego-ideal, and which is therefore kept at as
-great a distance as possible from it. Anyone who has read the touching
-accounts given by MacCurdy or Rivers[13] of the shame that soldiers
-feel at their increasing sense of fear, and the efforts they make to
-fight against it, to conceal it from others, and if possible from
-themselves, will recognise that the wish in question is one alien to
-the ego-ideal and is well on in the first stages of repression, even if
-it is half-avowed.
-
-(4) The fourth principle is that current repressed wishes cannot
-directly produce a neurosis, but do so only by reviving and reinforcing
-the wishes that have been repressed in older unresolved conflicts.
-According to Freud, a pathogenetic disappointment or difficulty in
-readjustment leads first to an introversion or turning inwards of
-feeling, and the wish that has been baulked seeks some other mode of
-gratification. It tends to regress back to an older period of life,
-and thus to become associated with similarly baulked and repressed
-wishes belonging to older conflicts. It is the combination of these
-two, the present and the old, that is the characteristic mark of the
-pathogenesis of neurotic disorders as distinct from other modes of
-reaction to the difficulties of life.
-
-Freud considers that there are probably always three factors in the
-causation of any neurosis: a specific hereditary predisposition,
-secondly an unresolved infantile conflict which means that the person
-has not satisfactorily developed past a given stage of individual
-evolution—in other words, that he has been subjected to what is called
-an “infantile fixation” at a given point in development, and thirdly
-the current difficulty. There is a reciprocal relationship between
-these three factors, so that if any one is especially pronounced the
-others may be correspondingly less important. For instance, if the
-hereditary factor is very pronounced then a person may become neurotic
-from the quite ordinary experiences of childhood and adult life, for
-he is incapable of dealing adequately with them. In the case of war
-neuroses it is evident that the current factor is of the greatest
-importance, being, indeed, the only one that so far has attracted
-attention. The only traces of infantile factors I have seen noted have
-been the instances where the localisation of hysterical symptoms seems
-to have been determined in part by the site of old injuries, and in
-a general way the many traits of childhood, such as sensitiveness to
-slights, self-centredment, and desire to be guarded, protected, and
-helped, which are sometimes very evident in the cases of war neurosis.
-
-We thus see that only one half of the psycho-analytical theory has
-so far been confirmed by the observations of war neuroses. According
-to this theory, there are typically two sets of wishes concerned
-in the production of any neurosis. One of these, the “primary gain
-of illness”, a current one, alien to the conscious ego ideal, and
-therefore half repressed and only half conscious—if that—has not only
-been demonstrated by a number of observers, but has been shewn to
-be of tremendous importance, and certainly the effects of treatment
-largely turn on the way in which it is dealt with. The other factor,
-the infantile and altogether repressed and unconscious one, which,
-according to psycho-analysis, is also essential to the production of a
-neurosis, has not been systematically sought for, though I have found
-it in the few cases of which I have been able to make a full study. Its
-presence or absence is a matter of greater theoretical importance than
-might perhaps appear, even though its practical importance may often
-not be great. For my own part I have the utmost difficulty in believing
-that a current wish, however strong that is half conscious and
-sometimes fully conscious can ever in itself produce a neurosis, for
-it contradicts all one’s knowledge concerning the nature of neuroses,
-as well as my experience, such as it is, of war neuroses themselves. I
-would therefore urge that no conclusion is possible on the matter one
-way or the other until adequate investigations have been carried out.
-That it has its practical side also will be pointed out when we come to
-consider the chronic cases where war neuroses pass over into peace ones.
-
-(5) The principle of the psycho-analytical theory that has aroused the
-strongest opposition is that the primary repressed wish ultimately
-responsible for the neurosis is always of a sexual nature, so that the
-conflict is between the two groups of instincts that go to make up
-the whole personality, those concerned respectively with preservation
-of the self and of the species. Dr. MacCurdy has suggested to me
-that this is so only because, apart from war, there is no instinct
-that comes into such strong conflict with the ego-ideal as does the
-sexual one, but that in war the conflict between the instinct for
-self-preservation and the ego-ideal is enough to lead to a neurosis.
-This may seem very plausible, but I shall be surprised if it is
-confirmed by future research. That a neurosis, which after all is a
-disorder of the unconscious imagination, should arise from a conflict
-between two states of mind that are fully in contact with reality would
-be something entirely contradictory of our past experience, as would
-also a neurosis arising from a conflict between two tendencies both
-belonging to the ego. I shall venture to put forward an alternative
-hypothesis presently when discussing the subject of fear, which we
-have next to consider.
-
-Freud states[14] that from one point of view all psychoneurotic
-symptoms may be regarded as having been constructed in order to prevent
-the development of fear—another point of contact between his theory
-and the observers of war neuroses, who would surely agree that fear
-is the central problem they have to deal with. By fear is here meant
-rather the mental state of dread and apprehension, increasing even
-into terror, and accompanied by well-marked bodily manifestations, a
-state for which psychopathologists have agreed to use the term “morbid
-anxiety” (or, shortly, “anxiety”) in a special technical sense as being
-the nearest equivalent of the German word _Angst_.
-
-Morbid anxiety is certainly the commonest neurotic symptom, and the
-theory of its pathogenesis has been the occasion of a very great deal
-of investigation,[15] with, in my opinion, very fruitful results. We
-meet it in the form of a general apprehensiveness of impending danger
-and evil, as the anxiety-neurosis, and also in hysteria in the form
-both of apparently causeless attacks of dread and of innumerable
-specific phobias. In all its forms its most striking feature is the
-disproportion between its intensity and its apparent justification,
-so that it seems at first sight extremely difficult to correlate with
-the biological view of fear as a useful instinct that guards against
-danger. Practically all modern investigations into its pathogenesis
-agree that it stands in the closest relation with unsatisfied and
-repressed sexuality, and, in my judgment, the conclusion that morbid
-anxiety represents the discharge of repressed and unconscious sexual
-hunger is one of the most securely established in the whole of
-psychopathology; it is impossible here to consider the extensive
-evidence in support of this conclusion, and I can only refer to the
-published work on the subject[16].
-
-The next question is: What is the relation between morbid anxiety as
-seen in peace neuroses and real—_i.e_., objectively justified—fear, as
-seen in various situations of acute danger and so prominently in the
-war neuroses? The point of connection is the defensive character of
-the reaction. Morbid anxiety, as we are familiar with it in the peace
-neuroses, is a defensive reaction of the ego against the claims of
-unrecognised “sexual hunger” (_Libido_), which it projects on to the
-outside world—e.g., in the form of phobias—and treats as if it were an
-external object; it is, in a word, the ego’s fear of the unconscious.
-But there appears to be an important difference between it and “real”
-dread in that the latter concerns only the ego itself, arises only in
-connection with external danger to the ego, and has nothing to do with
-the desires of repressed sexual hunger. One is tempted to say that the
-latter (real dread) is a normal protective mechanism that has nothing
-to do with the abnormal mechanism of morbid anxiety. Here, however,
-as elsewhere, the line between normality and abnormality is not so
-absolute as might appear, and consideration of the matter leads one
-to examine more closely into the nature of real dread itself. We then
-see that this can be dissected into three components, and that the
-whole reaction is not appropriate and useful as is commonly assumed.
-The reaction to external danger consists normally of a mental state
-of fear, which will be examined further in a moment, and in various
-activities suited to the occasion—flight, concealment, defence by
-fighting, or even sometimes by attacking. On the affective side there
-is, to begin with, a state of anxious preparedness and watchfulness,
-with its sensorial attentiveness and its motor tension. This is clearly
-a useful mental state, but it often goes on further into a condition
-of developed dread or terror which is certainly the very reverse of
-useful, for it not only paralyses whatever action may be suitable, but
-even inhibits the functioning of the mind, so that the person cannot
-judge or decide what he ought best to do were he able to do it. The
-whole reaction of “real” fear is thus seen to consist of two useful
-components and one useless one, and it is just this useless one that
-most resembles in all its phenomena the condition of morbid anxiety.
-Further, there is seen to be a complete lack of relation between
-development of dread and the degree or imminence of danger, nor does it
-bear any relation to the useful defensive activities. Thus, one does
-not flee because one is frightened, but because one perceives danger;
-in situations of extreme danger men very often respond with suitable
-measures of flight, fight, or what not, when they are not in the least
-degree frightened; on the other hand, the neurotic can be extremely
-frightened when there is no external danger whatever. The inference
-from these considerations is that even in situations of real danger a
-state of developed dread is not part of the useful biological mechanism
-of defence, but is an abnormal response akin to the neurotic symptom of
-morbid anxiety.
-
-In a recent publication[17] Freud has made the striking suggestion
-that the developed dread sometimes found in situations of real danger
-is derived, not from the repressed sexual hunger that is directed
-towards external objects, as is the case with morbid anxiety of the
-peace neuroses, but from the narcissistic part of the sexual hunger
-that is attached to the ego, and I venture to suggest that we may here
-have the key to the states of terror with which we are so familiar in
-the war neuroses. The psycho-analytic investigations of recent years
-have laid increasing stress on the distinction between “object-libido”,
-the sexual impulses that are directed outwards, and the “ego-libido”,
-the narcissistic portion that is directed inwards and constitutes
-self-love. There is good reason to suppose that the latter is the
-more primary of the two, and also the more extensive—though the least
-explored as yet—so that it constitutes, as it were, a well from which
-externally directed sexuality is but on overflow. The analogy naturally
-occurs to one of the protoplasmic outpourings in the pseudopodia of
-the amœba, and the reciprocal relation of these to the main body
-seems to be similar to that between love of others and self-love. It
-has been known for some time that there is a limit on the part of the
-organism to tolerate without suffering more than a given quantity of
-sexual hunger in its familiar sense of impulses directed outwards, and
-analytic study of the psychoses, notably of paraphrenia, has shewn
-that the same is even more profoundly true of the narcissistic sexual
-hunger. In both cases, before other symptoms are formed so as to deal
-with the energies in question and bind them, the first thing that
-happens is a discharge in the form of morbid anxiety, so that we reach
-the comforting conclusion that a normal man would be entirely free from
-dread in the presence of any danger, however imminent, that he would be
-as fearless as Siegfried; it is a gratifying thought that there seem
-to be many such in our Army to-day. It seems to me probable that the
-intolerance of narcissistic sexual hunger which leads to dread in the
-presence of real danger is to be correlated with the inhibition of the
-other manifestations of the fear instinct, with the accumulated tension
-characteristic of the mode of life in the trenches.
-
-I would suggest, therefore, that investigations be undertaken from
-this point of view with cases of war neurosis, especially the anxiety
-cases. Many of the features noted by MacCurdy[18], for instance,
-accord well with the picture of wounded self-love: thus, the lack of
-sociability, the sexual impotence and lack of affection for relatives
-and friends, the feeling that their personality has been neglected,
-or slighted, that their importance is not sufficiently recognised,
-and so on. Perhaps a new light may also be thrown in this way on the
-attitude of such patients towards death. I understand that a great part
-of the war neurotic symptoms, and the battle dreams in particular,
-have been widely interpreted as symbolising the desire to die so as
-to escape from the horrors of life, an interpretation that does not
-accord well with the equally widespread view that the fundamental
-cause of such neuroses is a fear of death. I greatly doubt, on the
-contrary, whether the fundamental attitude is either a fear of death
-in the literal sense or a desire for death. The conscious mind has
-difficulty enough in encompassing in the imagination the conception
-of absolute annihilation, and there is every reason to think that the
-unconscious mind is totally incapable of such an idea. When the idea of
-death reaches the unconscious mind it is at once interpreted in one of
-two ways: either as a reduction of essential vital activity, of which
-castration is a typical form, or as a state of nirvana in which the ego
-survives, but freed from the disturbances of the outer world.
-
-A word in conclusion as to the therapeutic aspects of psycho-analysis
-in the war neuroses. Even if it were possible, I see no reason whatever
-why a psycho-analysis should be undertaken in the majority of the
-cases, for they can be cured in much shorter ways. But I consider that
-a training in psycho-analysis is of the very highest value in treating
-such cases, from the understanding it gives of such matters as the
-symbolism of symptoms, the mechanisms of internal conflict, the nature
-of the forces at work, and so on, and there is certainly a considerable
-class of cases where psycho-analysis holds out the best, and sometimes
-the only, prospect of relief—namely, in those chronic cases where
-the war neurosis proper has, by association of current with older
-conflicts, passed over into a peace neurosis and become consolidated as
-such.
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] I shall only here take into consideration the most important
-publications out of the enormous amount of neurological literature of
-the war, and only in so far as this refers to psycho-analysis. I am
-indebted to Dr. M. Eitingon and Prof. Dr. A. v. Sarbó for access to the
-necessary authorities.
-
-[2] One of Oppenheim’s critics has suggested that these words so
-difficult to pronounce might be used as test words in the examination
-of paralytic disturbances of speech, so that they might at least be of
-some good.
-
-[3] These facts have been confirmed in the course of the conference by
-all taking part in the discussions.
-
-[4] (“_Münchner Mediz. Wochenschrift_”. 1918, No. 42, P. 1150.)
-
-[5] The hallucinations, which those persons who having had an
-amputation experience, that that part of the body which has been taken
-away is still there, might find an explanation from this source.
-
-[6] The intention of the medical department of the Prussian War
-Ministry in regard to the organisation of psycho-analytical treatment
-stations was not carried out in consequence of the altered political
-situation, which took place soon after the Congress.
-
-[7] Read before the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Psychiatry,
-April 9, 1918. Published in the Proceedings, Vol. XI. Reprinted in
-“Papers on Psycho-Analysis”: Jones, 2nd. Ed. 1918, Ch. XXXIII, p. 564.
-(Baillière, Tindall & Cox.).
-
-[8] By Freud, “Allgemeine Neurosenlehre”, 1917, S. 286.
-
-[9] Eder, “War Shock,” 1917.
-
-[10] MacCurdy, “War Neuroses”, _Psychiatric Bull._, July, 1917, pp.
-252, 253.
-
-[11] Trotter, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War”, 1916.
-
-[12] MacCurdy, _op. cit._
-
-[13] Rivers, “The Repression of War Experience”, _Proceedings of the
-Royal Society of Medicine_, 1918, xi (Sect. of Psych.), p. 1, Dec. 4,
-1917.
-
-[14] Freud, _op. cit._, S. 470.
-
-[15] The latest discussion of the subject will be found in Freud’s
-“Allgemeine Neurosenlehre,” 1917, chapter xxv, “Die Angst”. See also
-his papers in “Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre,” 1906,
-chapters v, vi, vii, and a general review of the subject in my “Papers
-on Psycho-Analysis,” 2nd ed., 1918, chapter xxvii, “The Pathology of
-Morbid Anxiety”.
-
-[16] _See_ also Stekel, “Angstzustände,” 2e. Aufl., 1912.
-
-[17] Freud, _op. cit._, S. 502.
-
-[18] MacCurdy, _op. cit._, pp. 269-272.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, by
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-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, by
-Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel and Ernest Jones and Sigmund Freud
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
-
-Author: Sándor Ferenczi
- Karl Abraham
- Ernst Simmel
- Ernest Jones
- Sigmund Freud
-
-Release Date: August 27, 2017 [EBook #55443]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND WAR NEUROSES ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-
-<div class="transnote">
-<p>The name Freund at page 8, which is likely to be a reference to Freud, has been corrected accordingly.</p>
-
-<p>The erroneous Roman number vli in footnote 15 is corrected to be vii just as a guess.</p>
-
-</div>
-
-
-
-
-<p class="center">THE INTERNATIONAL<br />
-PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL<br />
-LIBRARY<br /><br />
-
-<small>EDITED BY ERNEST JONES<br /><br />
-
-NO. 2</small></p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="center">THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL LIBRARY<br />
-NO. 2</p>
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<h1><span class="gesperrt">PSYCHO-ANALYSIS</span><br />
-
-<small><small>AND THE</small></small><br />
-
-<span class="gesperrt">WAR NEUROSES</span></h1>
-
-<p class="center"><small>by<br />
-
-Drs. S. FERENCZI (Budapest), KARL ABRAHAM (Berlin),<br />
-ERNST SIMMEL (Berlin) and ERNEST JONES (London)<br />
-<br />
-
-Introduction by<br />
-Prof. SIGM. FREUD (Vienna)</small></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
-<img src="images/mark.jpg" width="150" height="147" alt="" />
-</div>
-
-<table summary="publisher"><tr>
-<td class="tdc" colspan="3">THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL PRESS</td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdl">LONDON</td><td class="tdc">VIENNA</td><td class="tdr">NEW YORK</td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdc" colspan="3">1921</td>
-</tr></table>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p class="center"><small><small><small>Copyright, 1921<br />
-<br />
-C. Fromme, Printer, Vienna</small></small></small></p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
-
-<table summary="contents" border="0"><tr>
-<td class="tdr" colspan="3"><small>PAGE</small></td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdr vertt">I.</td><td class="tdl">Introduction by Prof. Sigm. Freud</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdr vertt">II.</td><td class="tdl">Symposium held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical
-Congress at Budapest, September 1918:</td><td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdl padl4" colspan="2">1. Dr. S. Ferenczi</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdl padl4" colspan="2">2. Dr. Karl Abraham</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdl padl4" colspan="2">3. Dr. Ernst Simmel</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td>
-</tr><tr>
-<td class="tdr vertt">III.</td><td class="tdl">War Shock and Freud’s Theory of the Neuroses, by Dr.
-Ernest Jones</td><td class="tdr vertb"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td>
-</tr></table>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
-
-<h2>I.<br />
-
-INTRODUCTION</h2>
-
-<p class="center"><span class="smcap">By Professor Sigm. Freud</span>, Vienna.</p>
-
-
-<p><span class="smcap">This</span> little book on the War Neuroses, with which the Verlag opens
-the “Internationale psychoanalytische Bibliothek”, deals with a subject
-which until lately engaged the greatest current interest. When the subject
-came up for discussion at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress at
-Budapest (September, 1918), official representatives of the Central European
-Powers were present to obtain information from the lectures and
-discussions. The hopeful result of this first meeting was the promise that
-psycho-analytical institutions should be established, where medical men
-qualified in analysis might find the means and time to study the nature of
-these puzzling illnesses and the therapeutic value of psycho-analysis
-in them. However, before these results could be achieved the war
-came to an end, the government organisations broke down, and interest
-in war neuroses gave place to other concerns. At the same time,
-significantly enough, most of the neurotic diseases which had been
-brought about by the war disappeared on the cessation of the war
-conditions. The opportunity, therefore, for a thorough investigation
-of these affections was unfortunately missed. However, one must add,
-it is to be hoped that it will be a very long time before such an
-opportunity again occurs. This episode, now a thing of the past, has
-not been without importance for the spread of the knowledge of
-psycho-analysis. Many medical men, who had previously held themselves
-aloof from psycho-analysis, have been brought into close touch
-with its theories through their service with the army compelling them
-to deal with the question of the war neuroses. The reader can easily
-gather from Ferenczi’s contribution to the subject with what hesitation
-and misgivings this advance was made. Some of the factors, such as
-the psycho-genetic origin of the symptoms, the significance of unconscious
-impulses, and the part that the primary advantage of being
-ill plays in the adjusting psychical conflicts (“flight into disease”),
-all of which had long before been discovered and described as operating
-in the neuroses of peace time, were found also in the war neuroses
-and almost generally accepted. The work of E. Simmel has shown<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
-what results may be obtained if the war neurotic is treated by the
-cathartic method, which, as is well known, was the first stage of the
-psycho-analytic technique.</p>
-
-<p>From the advance thus made towards psycho-analysis, however,
-one need not assume that the opposition to it has been reconciled or
-neutralised. One might think that when a man, who had hitherto not
-accepted any of a number of connected conclusions, suddenly finds
-himself in the position of being convinced of the truth of a part of
-them, he would weaken in his opposition and adopt an attitude of respectful
-attention, lest the other part, of which he has no personal experience,
-and therefore upon which he is unable to form a personal opinion,
-should also prove to be correct.</p>
-
-<p>This other part of the psycho-analytical theory which is not touched
-upon in the study of the war neuroses is that the driving forces
-which find expression in the formation of symptoms are sexual in
-nature, and that the neurosis is the result of the conflict between the
-ego and the sexual impulses which it has repudiated. The term
-“sexuality” is to be taken here in the broader sense customary in
-psycho-analysis, and not to be confused with the narrower sense of
-“genitality”. Now it is quite correct, as Ernest Jones points out in
-his contribution, that this part of the theory has not hitherto been
-demonstrated in relation to the war neuroses. The work which could
-prove this part has not yet been carried out. It may be that the war
-neuroses are unsuitable material for this proof. However, the opponents
-of psycho-analysis, whose repugnance to sexuality has shown
-itself to be stronger than their logic, have hastened to proclaim that
-investigation of the war neuroses has finally disproved this part of
-the psycho-analytical theory. In this pronouncement they have been
-guilty of a slight confusion. If the—up to the present superficial—investigation
-of war neuroses has not shown that the sexual theory
-of the neuroses is correct, that is quite another matter from showing
-that this theory is incorrect.</p>
-
-<p>With an impartial attitude and some willingness it should not be
-difficult to find the way to further elucidation.</p>
-
-<p>The war neuroses, in so far as they differ from the ordinary
-neuroses of peace time through particular peculiarities, are to be
-regarded as traumatic neuroses, whose existence has been rendered
-possible or promoted through an ego-conflict. In Abraham’s contribution
-there are plain indications of this ego-conflict; the English
-and American authors whom Jones quotes have also recognised it.
-The conflict takes place between the old ego of peace time and the
-new war-ego of the soldier, and it becomes acute as soon as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>
-peace-ego is faced with the danger of being killed through the risky
-undertakings of his newly formed parasitical double. Or one might
-put it, the old ego protects itself from the danger to life by flight
-into the traumatic neurosis in defending itself against the new ego
-which it recognises as threatening its life. The National Army was
-therefore the condition, and fruitful soil, for the appearance of war
-neuroses; they could not occur in professional soldiers, or mercenaries.</p>
-
-<p>The other feature of the war neurosis is that it is a traumatic
-neurosis, such as is well known to occur in peace time after fright or
-severe accidents, without any reference to an ego-conflict.</p>
-
-<p>The theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses, or as we
-prefer to call it, the sexual hunger (libido) theory, was originally put
-forward only as regards the transference neuroses of peace conditions,
-and can be easily demonstrated in them by using the analytic technique.
-But its application to those other affections, which more recently
-we have grouped together as the narcissistic neuroses, meets with
-difficulties. Ordinary cases of Dementia praecox, Paranoia and Melancholia
-are fundamentally very unsuitable material for the proof of the sexual
-hunger (libido) theory and for reaching an understanding of it, for
-which reason psychiatrists, who neglect the transference neuroses
-cannot be reconciled to it. The traumatic neuroses (of peace time) have
-always been reckoned to be the most refractory in this respect, so
-that the appearance of the war neuroses does not add any fresh factor
-to the former situation.</p>
-
-<p>Only by advancing and making use of the idea of a “narcissistic sexual hunger
-(libido)”, that is to say, a mass of sexual energy that attaches
-itself to the ego and satisfies itself with this as otherwise it does only
-with an object, has it been possible to extend the sexual hunger (libido)
-theory to the narcissistic neuroses, and this entirely legitimate development
-of the concept of sexuality bids fair to do for these severer
-neuroses and for the psychoses all that one can expect from an empirically
-and tentatively progressing theory. The traumatic neurosis of peace
-time will also fit into this group when researches into the correlation
-undoubtedly subsisting between shock, anxiety, and narcissistic sexual
-hunger (libido) have reached success.</p>
-
-<p>If the traumatic and war neuroses emphasise the influence of the
-danger to life and not at all, or not clearly enough, that of the “denial
-of love”, on the other hand the aetiological claim of the former factor
-appearing there so powerfully, is lacking in the usual transference neuroses
-of peace time. Indeed it is vulgarly supposed that these latter
-sufferings are only promoted by indulgence, high-living and ease, which
-provide an interesting contrast to the conditions of life under which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
-the war neuroses break out. If psycho-analysts, who find their patients
-have become ill through the “denial of love”, through the ungratified
-demands of the sexual hunger (libido), were to follow the example of
-their opponents, they would maintain that either there are no danger
-neuroses, or that the affections following on terror are not neuroses.
-This has naturally never crossed their minds. On the contrary, they
-see the convenient possibility of combining in one conception the two
-apparently divergent sets of facts. In the traumatic and war neuroses
-the ego of the individual protects itself from a danger that either
-threatens it from without, or is embodied in a form of the ego itself,
-in the transference neuroses of peace time the ego regards its own
-sexual hunger (libido) as a foe, the demands of which appear threatening
-to it. In both cases the ego fears an injury; in the one case
-through the sexual hunger (libido) and in the other from outside forces.
-One might even say that in the case of the war neuroses the thing
-feared, is after all an inner foe, in distinction from the pure traumatic
-neuroses and approximating to the transference neuroses. The theoretical
-difficulties which stand in the way of such a unifying conception
-do not appear to be insurmountable; one can with full right designate
-the repression which underlies every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma,
-as an elementary traumatic neurosis.</p>
-
-<p>Spring 1919.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span></p>
-
-<h2>II.<br />
-
-SYMPOSIUM</h2>
-
-<p class="center">HELD AT THE<br />
-FIFTH INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL CONGRESS<br />
-BUDAPEST, SEPTEMBER 1918<br /><br /></p>
-
-<h3>1. <span class="smcap">Dr. S. Ferenczi</span>, Budapest.</h3>
-
-<p class="p padl4">
-<em>Ladies and Gentlemen</em>,<br />
-</p>
-
-<p><span class="smcap">With</span> your permission I will commence my exposition of the
-very serious and important subject that is the theme of my lecture
-to-day with the recital of a little story which will lead us straightway
-into the revolutionising events of this war. A Hungarian, who had the
-opportunity of observing at close quarters a part of the revolutionary
-upheaval in Russia, told me that the new revolutionary rulers of a
-Russian town found with consternation that the change from the old
-to the new regime had not taken place as rapidly as it should have
-done according to their doctrinal calculations. According to the
-teachings of the materialistic idea of history they could have set up
-the new social order immediately after they had got the entire power
-into their hands. Instead of this, irresponsible elements, which were
-antagonistic to any new order of things, obtained the upper hand, so
-that the power gradually slipped from the hands of the originators
-of the revolution. Then the leaders of the movement put their heads
-together in order to find out what had gone wrong in their calculations.
-Finally they agreed that perhaps the materialistic idea was after all
-too one-sided, as it only took into consideration the economic and
-commercial relations, and had forgotten to take into account one
-small matter, the feelings and thoughts of man, in a word, the psyche.
-They were sufficiently consistent to send emissaries immediately to
-German speaking countries, in order to obtain psychological works,
-so that they might get at least subsequently some knowledge of this
-neglected science. Many thousands of human lives fell victims, perhaps
-to no purpose, to this omission of the revolutionaries; the failure of
-their efforts resulted in their making one discovery however, namely,
-that of the mind.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span></p>
-
-<p>A somewhat similar thing has occurred among neurologists during
-the war. The war has produced an enormous number of nervous disorders
-which call for elucidation and cure; however, the familiar
-organic-mechanistic explanation hitherto adopted—which in some
-way corresponds to the materialistic idea of history in sociology—completely
-failed. The mass-experiment of the war has produced
-various severe neuroses, including those in which there could be no
-question of a mechanical influence, and the neurologists have likewise
-been forced to recognise that something was missing in their calculations,
-and this something was again—the psyche.</p>
-
-<p>To some extent we can forgive sociology for this omission; indeed
-the estimation of mental elements in the science of society has hitherto
-been in fact a very trifling one. However, we cannot spare neurologists
-the reproach of having so long disregarded the pioneer researches of
-Breuer and Freud concerning the psychical determination of many
-nervous disturbances, and of having required the terrible experiences
-of the war to set them right in this respect. And yet a science—psycho-analysis—has
-existed for more than twenty years to which
-many investigators had devoted the whole of their efforts, and which
-had helped us to unexpected and important knowledge of the mechanisms
-of mental life and its disturbances.</p>
-
-<p>In my lecture today I shall confine myself to demonstrating the
-introduction of psycho-analysis into modern neurology, an introduction
-which has been effected to some small extent openly, but for the most
-part with hesitation and under false colours, and I will briefly communicate
-the theoretical principles upon which rest the psycho-analytical
-conceptions of the “traumatic neuroses” which have been observed
-during the war<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a>.</p>
-
-<p>Soon after the outbreak of the war there flamed up again the
-great controversy, which had been carried on for more than ten years,
-concerning the nature of the traumatic neuroses which Oppenheim
-had in his time placed in a class by themselves. Oppenheim hastened
-to make use of the experiences of the war, which exposed so many
-thousands of men to sudden shocks, as supporting his old views,
-according to which the phenomena of these neuroses always came
-about, as the result of physical alterations in the nervous centres, (or
-in the peripheral nerves which secondarily affect those of the centre).
-The nature of the shock itself and its influence upon the method of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>
-functioning he described in very general, one might even say, phantastic
-terms. Links were “cut out” from the chain of the innervation
-mechanism, most delicate elements “displaced”, paths “blocked”, connections
-torn asunder, obstacles to conduction created, etc. With
-these and similar comparisons, from which, however, all basis in fact
-was tacking, Oppenheim sketched an impressive picture of the material
-correlation of the traumatic neuroses.</p>
-
-<p>The alterations in structure which would take place in the brain
-through the trauma Oppenheim conceived as a delicate physical process
-similar to that which occurs in the iron filing when it comes into
-contact with the magnet.</p>
-
-<p>The sarcastic Gaupp designates such specious physical and physiological
-speculations as brain mythology and molecular mythology.
-But in our opinion he does mythology an injustice.</p>
-
-<p>The material brought forward by Oppenheim to support his views
-was in no way suited to uphold his abstruse theories. To be sure, he
-described with his usual precision characteristic symptoms, which this
-war has produced in deplorable numbers, and also gave to them somewhat
-high-sounding names (Akinesia amnestica, Myotonoklonia trepidans)
-that said nothing as to their nature; these descriptions, however,
-are not especially convincing with reference to his theoretical
-conceptions<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a>.</p>
-
-<p>There were, it is true, many who agreed with Oppenheim’s views,
-though for the most part with limitations. Goldscheider holds that
-the cause of these nervous symptoms is partly physical and partly
-psychical; Cassierer, Schuster and Birnbaum are of the same opinion.
-Wollenberg’s question, as to whether the war neuroses were caused
-through emotion or shock, Aschaffenburg answered by stating that
-there was here concerned the joint effect of emotion and concussion.
-As one of the few who obstinately persisted in maintaining the mechanistic
-idea I will mention Lilienstein, who categorically demanded that
-the word and the concept of “mind”, also that of “functional” and
-“psychic”, and more especially that of “psycho-genesis” should be
-struck out of the medical terminology; he maintained that this would
-simplify the conflict and facilitate the investigation, treatment and
-examination of the casualties; the progressive anatomical technique
-would certainly sooner or later discover the material foundations of
-the neuroses.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span></p>
-
-<p>We must here refer to the train of thought pursued by V. Sarbó,
-who seeks for the cause of the war neuroses in the microscopical destruction
-of tissue and hemorrhages in the central organ of the nervous
-system; these, he says, originate through direct concussion, sudden
-pressure of the cerebro-spinal fluid, compression of the spinal cord
-in the foramen magnum, etc. V. Sarbó’s theory is only supported by
-a few authors. In this connection I might mention Sachs and Freud,
-who consider that the shock puts the nerve cells into a condition of
-heightened excitability and exhaustability, which is then the immediate
-cause of the neuroses. Finally, Bauer and Fauser look upon the traumatic
-neuroses as the nervous results of disturbances of the endocrine
-glands produced by the shock, and as similar therefore to the
-post-traumatic Basedow’s disease.</p>
-
-<p>Strümpell was one of the first to oppose the purely organic-mechanistic
-idea of the war neuroses. He had, moreover, for some time
-previously referred to certain psychical factors in the causation of
-the traumatic neuroses. He made the accurate observation that in
-railway accidents, etc., those who suffered from a severe neurosis
-were for the most part those who had an <em>interest</em> in being able to
-prove an injury as caused by the trauma: for example, persons who
-were insured against accidents and wished to obtain a large sum of
-money, or those who instituted proceedings against the railway company
-for compensation for injury. Similar or much more severe shocks
-have, however, no lasting nervous results if the accident happens
-during sport through one’s own carelessness, especially under circumstances
-that exclude the hope of compensation for injury as those
-mentioned, so that the patient has no interest in remaining ill, but
-every interest in the speediest recovery. Strümpell asserts that the
-shock neuroses always develop secondarily and purely psycho-genetically
-as the result of desire of gain; he gave medical men the well-meant
-advice not to take seriously the complaints of these patients,
-like Oppenheim, but to bring them back as soon as possible to life
-and work through the smallest allowance or through withdrawal of
-their pension. The representations of Strümpell created a great impression
-in the medical world even in peace time; they led to the
-idea of the “compensation hysteria”; the sufferers, however, were treated
-not much better than if they were malingerers. Strümpell now
-suggests that the war neuroses are also neuroses of covetousness,
-which serve the patients’ purpose in getting free from the military
-authorities with the highest possible pension. Accordingly he demands
-a strict examination and expert opinion of the neuroses occurring in
-military persons. The content of the pathogenic ideas is always a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
-wish—the wish for material compensation, for remaining far from
-infections and danger—and this wish acts along auto-suggestive paths
-in fixing more firmly the symptoms, the persistence of morbid sensations
-and of innervation disturbances of motility.</p>
-
-<p>Much of the foregoing train of thought of Strümpell sounds to
-the analyst very probable. For he knows from his analytical experience
-that neurotic symptoms in general represent wish fulfilments,
-and also the fixation of unpleasant mental impressions and their pathogenic
-state is familiar to him. Still he has to reproach the one-sidedness
-of Strümpell’s train of thought: for instance, in the undue prominence
-of the cognitive aspect of the pathogenic experience and the
-neglect of its affective side, as well as the complete ignoring of the
-unconscious psychical processes, with which already Kurt Singer,
-Schuster and Gaupp had reproached him. Strümpell also has a presentiment
-that these neurotic forms of illness can only be explained by
-means of a psychical investigation; he does not, however, tell us his
-method of work with reference to this. Probably he understands by
-psychical exploration simply a careful questioning of the patient as
-to his material circumstances and concerning his motives for seeking
-a pension. We must on the other hand protect ourselves in that he
-calls this exploration “a method of individual psycho-analysis”. There
-is only one procedure that has a right to this name, that which the
-strict method of psycho-analysis has made its own.</p>
-
-<p>As an argument in favour of the psycho-genesis of the war neuroses
-it is a remarkable fact, which has been pointed out by Mörchen,
-Bonhöffer and others, that the traumatic neuroses are practically never
-seen in prisoners of war. The prisoners of war have no interest in
-remaining sick after being captured, and they cannot reckon on compensation,
-pension and sympathy from their surroundings while they
-are away from home. They feel themselves in their captivity secure
-for the time being from the dangers of the war. The theory of the
-mechanistic shock can never explain to us this difference in the behaviour
-of our own soldiers and prisoners of war.</p>
-
-<p>Evidence as regards the psycho-genesis rapidly accumulated.
-Schuster and many other observers refer to the disproportion between
-the trauma and its results on the nervous system. Severe neuroses
-arise from minimal shocks, while it is just the severe wounds accompanied
-by great shock that for the most part are not followed by
-nervous disturbances. Kurt Singer lays still greater stress on the disproportion
-between trauma and neurosis, and even endeavours to explain
-this fact psychologically: “In the kind of psychic trauma that
-comes on in a flash, in the terror, in the paralysing horror, we are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
-concerned with cases of difficulty or impossibility of adaptation to
-the stimulus”. In a severe wound there is a discharge of the suddenly
-increased tension without anything further; when, however, no severe
-external injury exists the excessive affect is discharged “by means of
-a sudden abreaction through physical phenomena”. As the Freudian
-expression “abreaction” shows, psycho-analysis must have been in the
-mind of the writer when he thought out this theory. The expression
-sounds like a delayed response to the Breuer-Freudian conversion
-theory. However, it soon appears that Singer represents this process
-far too rationalistically; he looks upon the symptoms of the traumatic
-neuroses as the result of an effort on the part of the patient to find
-a comprehensible explanation of the (to him) inexplicable morbid
-process. Thus the work of this author is still far removed from the
-dynamic conception of the psychical processes of which psycho-analysis
-has taught us.</p>
-
-<p>Hauptmann, Schmidt and others drew attention to the relation in
-time in the development of the symptoms in the war neuroses. If it
-is a question of a mechanical injury then the effect should be strongest
-immediately after the operation of the force. Instead of which one
-finds that the men thrown into a state of shock still make purposive
-endeavours to arrange for their safety the moment after the trauma,
-such as to get to the dressing station, etc., and only after having put
-themselves under safe conditions do they collapse and the symptoms
-develop. In some cases the symptoms appear only when the men
-have to return to the firing line after a period of rest. Schmidt is
-quite right when he refers this conduct of the patients to the psychical
-factors; he suggests that the neurotic symptoms develop only after
-the state of a transitory disturbance of consciousness has disappeared
-and the men who have suffered the shock re-experience in memory
-the dangerous situation. We would say: These injured men behave
-like the mother who rescues her child from a danger which threatens
-its life with calm imperturbability and disregard of death, but faints
-after the act has been accomplished. It is immaterial as regards the
-judgment of the psychological situation that here the person saved
-was not a beloved stranger, but the beloved person himself.</p>
-
-<p>I place Nonne in the forefront of those authors who have laid
-particular stress on the psycho-genesis of the traumatic neuroses of
-the war. Not only because he recognised that the symptoms of
-the war shock neuroses were without exception hysterical, but because
-he was also able to cause the severest war neurotic symptoms to
-disappear for a time or to recall them by hypnotic and suggestive
-measures. This excluded the possibility even of a “molecular” dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>turbance
-in the nerve tissues; a disturbance that can be set right by
-means of psychic influences can itself have been nothing else than
-psychical.</p>
-
-<p>This therapeutic argument had the greatest effect; by degrees a
-marked silence fell over the mechanistic school, and attempts were
-frequently made to explain their former utterances psycho-genetically.
-The quarrel from now onwards lay entirely between the supporters
-of the various psychological theories.</p>
-
-<p>How is one to explain the method of working of psychical factors,
-and also the fact of the psychogenic condition being more severe
-than the impressive forms of disorders of organic origin?</p>
-
-<p>One is reminded of the old theory of Charcot, that terror and
-the memory of it can produce in a similar manner physical symptoms
-after the nature of hypnosis and auto-hypnosis, just as they are intentionally
-brought about by the post-hypnotic command of the hypnotist.</p>
-
-<p>This reverting to Charcot means nothing less than paving the
-way to fruitless speculations and the re-discovery of the sources from
-which finally psycho-analysis sprang; for we know that the first researches
-of Breuer and Freud into the psychical mechanisms of hysterical
-phenomena originated directly from the influence of Charcot’s clinical
-and experimental experiences. Hysterics suffer from reminiscences:
-this, the primary axiom of the germinating psycho-analysis, is really
-the continuation, deepening, and generalisation of the ideas of Charcot
-applied to the neuroses of shock; the idea of the lasting effect
-of a sudden affect and of the association of certain expressions of
-affect with the memory of the thing experienced is common to
-both.</p>
-
-<p>Let us now compare with this the views of German neurologists
-on the genesis of the war neuroses. Goldscheider says: “Sudden and
-terrifying impressions can leave behind affects direct and also with
-the associative help of ideation; to these memory pictures are due
-the results of increased and lowered excitability. Thus it is the emotion,
-the terror, which bestows upon the trauma the distribution and
-fixation of the nervous results of the stimulus, which never occurs
-with the purely physical stimulus itself”. It is easy to recognise that
-this description is borrowed from the traumatic theory of Charcot and
-the Freudian conversion theory.</p>
-
-<p>Gaupp’s opinion is similar: “In spite of all the methods of modern
-experimental psychology and of all the more precise and more delicate
-methods of technique for neurological and psychiatric investigation,
-there remains a residue, and not an insignificant one, in which
-we do not arrive at a diagnosis by means of the present exact neuro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>logical
-and psychiatric investigation of the condition at the moment
-present, but only through its connection with an exact anamnesis and
-with a laborious exploration of the pathogenesis of the existing condition”.
-Gaupp accepts even explicitly a Freudian postulation, in that
-he describes the war neuroses as a flight from psychic conflicts into
-illness and, alluding to psycho-analysis, he says: “Much preferable is
-the postulate of the effects of the unconscious on consciousness and
-the physical system than a psychological theory which seeks by words
-taken from the sciences of anatomy and physiology to gloss over the
-fact that the path from the physical to the mental and vice versa is
-entirely unknown to us”. In another place he goes still further and
-puts the psycho-analytical postulate of the unconscious in the centre
-of the whole problem. “If one only admits that mental processes can
-react upon the body even when they do not lie in the conscious field
-of vision, then most of the supposed difficulties disappear”. In this
-connection Hauptmann must also be mentioned. He looks upon the
-traumatic neuroses as mental illnesses psycho-genetically elaborated
-and caused through emotional factors, and their symptoms as “unconscious
-further elaboration of the emotional factors along paths of
-least resistance”.</p>
-
-<p>Bonhoeffer seems to have completely accepted the psychologically
-complex experiences of psycho-analysis. He holds that the traumatic
-symptoms are “psycho-neurotic fixations, dissociation phenomena which
-have been rendered possible through the resultant splitting off of the
-affect from its ideational content under the influence of the violent
-emotion”.</p>
-
-<p>Birnbaum showed in his excellent summary of the literature of
-the traumatic neuroses that in many of the explanations of these neuroses
-(for example, in Strümpell’s theory of covetousness) is summed
-up a psychogenic wish of hysteria, and says: “If the psychogenic wish,
-the wish fixation, etc. is an essential component of hysteria then it
-belongs unconditionally in the definition of the disorder”. Psycho-analysis
-has long maintained this; as is well known, it regards the
-neurotic symptoms as expressions of unconscious wishes or as reactions
-to them.</p>
-
-<p>Vogt also refers to the “famous Freudian statement” according
-to which the troubled mind flies into illness and he acknowledges
-that “the compulsion which originates from this is more often unconscious
-than conscious”. Liepmann divides the symptoms of the
-traumatic neuroses into the direct results of the psychic trauma
-and into “finally adjusted psychic mechanisms”. Schuster speaks of
-symptoms which are evoked by means of “unconscious processes”.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span></p>
-
-<p>You see, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that the experiences
-among war neurotics gradually led further than to the discovery of
-the mind; they led neurologists very nearly to the discovery of psycho-analysis.
-When we read in the more recent literature on the subject,
-of the ideas and views which have become so familiar,—abreaction,
-unconscious, psychic mechanisms, separation of the affect from its
-idea, etc.,—we might easily imagine ourselves to be in a circle of
-psycho-analysts, and yet it has never occurred to these investigators
-to ask themselves whether, after these experiences in the war neuroses,
-the psycho-analytical concepts cannot be made use of in the
-explanation of the usual neuroses and psychoses which were well
-known to us in peace times. The specificity of the war trauma is universally
-denied; in general, it is said, that the war neuroses contain
-nothing and have added nothing new to the already known symptomatology
-of the neuroses; even the Munich Congress of German Neurologists
-formally demanded the elimination of the word and concept,
-“war neurosis”. If, however, the peace and war neuroses are identical
-in their nature, then neurologists will be obliged to make use of all
-these ideas of emotional shock, of the fixation of pathogenic memories,
-and of their continued activity in the unconscious, etc., also in
-the explanation of the usual hysterias, the obsessional neuroses and
-the psychoses. They will be astonished how easy it will be for them
-to traverse the path trodden by Freud, and will regret having shown
-such obstinate resistance to his hints.</p>
-
-<p>To the question of the disposition to fall sick with a war neurosis
-the authors gave contradictory answers. Most of them follow the views
-of Gaupp, Laudenheimer and others, according to whom most of the
-war neurotics are <em>ab ovo</em> neuropaths or psychopaths, the shock merely
-playing the part of the releasing factor. Bonhoeffer says direct: “The
-possibility of a psychopathological condition being evoked by psychogenic
-factors is the criterion of a degenerative predisposition”. Forster
-and Jendrassik say the same thing. Nonne, on the contrary, finds that
-the deciding factor in falling a victim to war neuroses lies less in
-the personal constitution than in the nature of the operating injury.
-Psycho-analysis takes a median position with regard to this question,
-which Freud has frequently and expressly stated. It speaks of an
-“aetiological succession” in the predisposition, the traumatic occasion
-figuring as reciprocal value with this. A trifling predisposition and
-severe shock can produce the same effects as an increased predisposition
-and a much lesser degree of shock. Psycho-analysis, however,
-is not content with the theoretical allusion to this condition, but it
-endeavours—with success—to separate the complex idea of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
-“disposition” into simpler elements and establish those constitutional
-factors that influence the choice of neurosis (the special tendency to
-fall sick with this or that neurosis). I shall return later to the question
-as to where psycho-analysis looks for the special disposition to falling
-sick with a traumatic neurosis.</p>
-
-<p>The literature concerning the symptomatology of the neuroses of
-the war is simply immense. According to Gaupp, for example, the
-following hysterical symptoms are to be observed. “Attacks of a slight
-nature up to those of the severest kind, with an <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">arc de cercle</em> lasting
-for hours, sometimes with epileptic frequency, astasia-abasia, anomalies
-of the position and movement of the body even to going on all fours,
-all the varieties of tic and shaking tremors, paralyses and contractures
-in monoplegic, hemiplegic and paraplegic forms, deafness and
-deaf and dumbness, stuttering and stammering, aphonia and rhythmical
-screaming, blindness with or without blepharo-spasm, all kinds of
-disturbances of sensation, and most of all twilight states in quantities
-never before met with and in combination with phenomena of physical
-irritation and disorders”. You see, it is like a museum of glaring
-hysterical symptoms, and whoever has once seen it will plainly have
-to decline Oppenheim’s view, according to which purely neurotic
-symptoms are rarely seen in the traumatic neuroses of the war.
-Schuster draws attention to the frequent vasomotor and trophic phenomena;
-according to him, these are no longer psychogenic. Psycho-analysis,
-however, will agree with those who hold that these symptoms
-can originate to some extent from psychic causes, analogous to the
-physical alterations which can be produced under hypnosis. Finally,
-all the authors allude to the alterations in disposition, apathy and
-over-excitability, etc. after the trauma.</p>
-
-<p>Out of this chaos of symptoms the “trembling” neurosis stands
-out through its frequency and conspicuousness. You all know those
-pathetic creatures who hobble along through the streets with shaking
-knees, uncertain gait and peculiar motor disturbances. They give the
-impression of being helpless and incurable invalids; and yet experience
-shows that also this traumatic form of illness is purely psychogenic.
-A single treatment with electricity and suggestion, a few hypnotic
-sittings are often sufficient in rendering these men capable of doing
-some work, if only temporarily and under certain conditions. Erben
-has made the most careful investigation into these disturbances of
-innervation; he found that these disturbances are only suspended or
-increased when the respective group of muscles carry out an action
-or intend to do so. His explanation for this is, that here the “volitional
-impulse makes a path for the spasm”, which, however, is only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
-the physiological paraphrase of the facts of the case. Psycho-analysis
-suspects here a psychical motivation: the activity of an unconscious
-contrary wish which puts itself in the way of the consciously wished
-act. This is indeed most striking in those patients of Erben who are
-prevented from going forward through the most violent attacks of
-shaking, but can carry out the much more difficult task of going
-backwards without trembling. Erben also here has a complicated
-physiological explanation ready, but forgets that the movement backwards,
-which removes the patient from the dangerous goal of the
-forward movement—and finally from the front line—does not
-need to be disturbed by any contrary wish. The remaining kinds of
-motor disturbances demand a similar interpretation, in particular the
-striking, uncontrollable running of many neurotics, so like the propulsion
-in paralysis agitans. These are the men who do not recover
-from the effect of the terror and are still always flying from dangers
-to which they were once exposed.</p>
-
-<p>Many investigators, including non-psycho-analysts, came to the
-conclusion from these and similar observations, that these disturbances
-are not the direct effects of the trauma, but psychical reactions to it
-and act in the service of the instinct of self-preservation against the
-repetition of the unpleasant occurrence. We know that also the normal
-organism has at its disposal such protective measures. The symptoms
-of the terror, such as the immovable legs, the tremblings, the hesitating
-speech, seem to be useful automatisms; one is reminded by
-them of certain animals which simulate being dead when danger
-threatens. And if Bonhoeffer looks upon these traumatic disturbances
-as fixations of the means of expression of the terrible emotion which
-has been suffered, Nonne goes further and discovers that “the hysterical
-symptoms represent partly a reminiscence of inborn guard and defence
-mechanisms, the suppression of which in those individuals whom we
-call hysterical has not taken place in the normal degree or not at
-all”. According to Hamburger the most frequently occurring type of
-disturbances of standing, walking and speech associated with shaking
-tremors represents a “complex of ideas of feebleness, weakness, refusal
-and exhaustion”, and Gaupp sees in the same symptoms the lapse
-into infantile and puerile states of obvious helplessness. Some authors
-actually speak of the “fixation” in the traumatic posture of the body
-and innervation.</p>
-
-<p>It cannot escape the notice of anyone with a knowledge of psycho-analysis
-how near these authors, without knowing it, are to psycho-analysis.
-The “expressions of fixations of movements” described by
-them are in reality only paraphrases of the Breuer-Freudian hysterical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
-conversion, and the lapse into atavistic and infantile methods of
-reaction is nothing more nor less than what Freud called special
-attention to as the regressive character of the neurotic symptoms,
-all of which according to him only signify reversions into ontogenetic
-and phylogenetic stages of development already overcome.
-At any rate we have definite proof that neurologists have now decided
-to <em>interpret</em> certain nervous symptoms, that is to say, refer them to
-unconscious psychical contents, which would never have occurred to
-anyone to do before the introduction of psycho-analysis.</p>
-
-<p>I will now speak of the few authors who occupy themselves
-with the war neuroses from the psycho-analytical points of view.</p>
-
-<p>Stern has published a work on the psycho-analytical treatment
-of the war neuroses in war hospitals. I have not been able to see
-the work in the original, but I learn from the abstracts that the
-author proceeds from the point of view of repression and finds the
-situation of the serving soldier particularly suited to the production
-of neuroses in consequence of the suppression of affects which his
-service demands. Schuster admits that the investigations of Freud
-“however one may feel towards them” have thrown a ray of light
-on the psycho-genesis of the neuroses; they assist in revealing the
-hidden connection between symptom and psychical content which
-still exists though difficult to discover. Mohr treats the war neuroses
-by the cathartic method of Breuer and Freud, by getting the patients
-to live through the critical scenes again and brings about an abreaction
-of their affects by letting them re-experience the terrible
-emotion. Simmel is the only one up to the present who has occupied
-himself methodically with the psycho-catharsis of the war neuroses,
-and he will give his own report of his experiences to the Congress.
-Finally, I will mention my own investigations concerning the
-psychology of the war neuroses, in which I made the attempt to
-bring the traumatic forms of disorder into the category of psycho-analysis.</p>
-
-<p>In this connection I will allude to a discussion which branches
-out in all directions on the question whether an affect can still act
-psycho-genetically when the person concerned immediately loses
-consciousness. Goldscheider and many others still maintain that a
-psychical effect is made impossible through swooning, and Aschaffenburg
-adheres to the view that loss of consciousness before falling
-ill guards against the neurosis. Nonne rightly opposes this view,
-and points out that unconscious mental streams could act psychically
-in spite of the loss of consciousness. L. Mann, relying on Breuer’s
-hypnoidal theory, puts forward the view that the loss of consciousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>
-before falling ill does not protect but disposes to the appearance of
-the neurosis, by preventing the discharge of the affects. Orlovsky
-expresses himself the most rationally on this vexed question; he
-points out the possibility that the swooning itself can be a psychogenic
-symptom, a flight into unconsciousness, which would spare the
-person concerned the conscious experiencing of the painful situation
-and sensations.</p>
-
-<p>The possibility of the psychogenic formation of symptoms during
-a faint is quite comprehensible to those of us who are psycho-analysts.
-This problem could be started only by authors who take up a
-standpoint, obsolete to psycho-analysis, that equates mental with
-conscious.</p>
-
-<p>I do not know, ladies and gentlemen, whether you also have obtained
-the impression from all these quotations and references (which are only
-taken at random from the literature) that an advance, even though one
-that is not admitted, has taken place in the attitude of leading neurologists
-towards the teachings of psycho-analysis. Moreover, candid
-recognition is not lacking; for example, the expression of Nonne, that
-Freud’s experiences concerning the elaboration in the unconscious have
-received interesting illuminations and corroborations through the experiences
-of the war.</p>
-
-<p>However, the same sentence of acknowledgement also contains a
-nihilistic opinion of Nonne concerning psycho-analysis; he states that
-Freud’s idea of the almost exclusively sexual foundation of hysteria
-has been conclusively disproved during the war. We can no longer leave
-this unanswered, which after all is only a partial denial of psycho-analysis:
-also we can very easily give the answer. The war neuroses, according
-to psycho-analysis, belong to a group of neuroses in which not only
-is the genital sexuality affected, as in ordinary hysteria, but also its
-precursor, the so-called narcissism, self-love, just as in dementia praecox
-and paranoia. I grant that the sexual foundation of these so-called
-narcissistic neuroses is less easily apparent, particularly to those who
-equate sexuality and genitality and have neglected to use the word
-“sexual” in the sense of the old platonic Eros. Psycho-analysis, however,
-returns to this extremely ancient standpoint when it treats all tender
-and sensual relations of the man to his own or to the opposite sex,
-emotional feelings towards friends, relatives and fellow-creatures generally,
-even the affective behaviour towards one’s own ego and body,
-partly under the rubric “erotism”, otherwise “sexuality”. It cannot be
-denied that those to whom this idea is strange cannot so easily be
-convinced of the correctness of Freud’s postulation of the sexual
-theory in a narcissistic neurosis in particular, for example, in the trau<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>matic
-neurosis. We should like to advise them to examine themselves
-into the usual (non-traumatic) hysteria and obsessional neuroses also,
-and to keep strictly to the methods of free association, dream and
-symptom interpretation proposed by Freud; then they will be much
-more easily convinced of the correctness of the sexual theories of the
-neuroses, and agreement about the sexual background of the war neuroses
-will follow. At any rate the triumph concerning the overthrow
-of the sexual theories is somewhat premature.</p>
-
-<p>The observation that I have made as regards the participation of
-sexual factors in the formation of symptoms in the traumatic neuroses
-also shows that in traumatic neurotics the genital sexual hunger (libido)
-and potency is generally greatly injured; in many cases it can even be
-entirely suspended and that for long periods. This condition which is a
-positive one is alone sufficient to demonstrate the rashness of Nonne’s
-conclusion<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a>.</p>
-
-<p>Ladies and gentlemen: With what I have said I have discharged
-the chief task of my paper, which was the critical survey of the literature
-on the war neuroses from the standpoint of psycho-analysis.
-However, I will make use of this rare opportunity to tell you some
-of the observations I have made myself, and I will present points
-of view which may help to explain these conditions psycho-analytically.</p>
-
-<p>In the psychical sphere of the traumatic neuroses there predominate
-such symptoms as hypochondriacal depression, terror, anxiousness, and
-a high degree of irritability with a tendency to outbursts of anger.
-Most of these symptoms can be traced back to <em>increased ego-sensitiveness</em>
-(in particular the hypochondria and the incapability of tolerating physical
-or mental discomfort). This over-sensitiveness arises from the fact
-that in consequence of the shock, which has been experienced once or
-repeatedly, the interest and sexual hunger (libido) of the patients is
-withdrawn from the object into the ego. There thus comes about a
-damming-up of the sexual hunger (libido) in the ego, which is expressed
-in those abnormal hypochondriacal organic sensations and over-sensitiveness.
-Frequently this heightened ego-love degenerates into a kind
-of infantile narcissism: the patients would like to be pampered, cared
-for, and pitied like children. One can therefore speak of a reversion
-into the childish stage of self-love. This heightening corresponds to
-the diminution of object-love, often also of genital potency. A man who
-is already predisposed to narcissism will of course sooner fall a victim
-to a traumatic neurosis; still no one is entirely immune from it, since<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>
-the stage of narcissism forms a significant fixation point in the development
-of the sexual hunger (libido) of every human being. The combination
-with other narcissistic neuroses, especially paranoia and dementia,
-frequently occurs.</p>
-
-<p>The symptom of anxiety is the sign of the shock to the self-confidence
-occasioned by the trauma. This is most strikingly expressed
-in men who, in consequence of an explosion, have been knocked down,
-hurled over or blown up and have thereby permanently lost their
-self-confidence. The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia
-with trembling) are protective measures against the repetition
-of the anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which
-these symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms,
-on the contrary, which simply express the situation at the
-moment of the explosion (innervation, position of the body) are
-conversion-hysterias in the psycho-analytical sense. Also in the anxiety
-there is naturally a constitutional predisposition; those persons more
-easily fall ill in this way who, in spite of real cowardice, are
-compelled from ambition to perform courageous deeds. The
-anxiety-hysterical disturbance in walking is at the same time a reversion
-to an infantile stage of not-being-able-to-walk or of learning-to-walk.</p>
-
-<p>Also the tendency to outbursts of rage and anger is a highly
-primitive method of reaction to a superior force; it can increase up
-to epileptic attacks, and represents more or less incoordinate discharges
-of affect analogous to those observed in the period of suckling. A
-milder variety of this loss of restraint is the lack of adaptation to
-discipline, which is practically never missing in the traumatic neuroses.
-The excessive need for love and the narcissism also give rise to
-this increased irritability.</p>
-
-<p>The entire personality of most of the victims of trauma corresponds
-therefore to the child who is fretting, whimpering, unrestrained
-and naughty in consequence of a fright. The excessive importance
-which almost all the persons suffering from trauma attach to good
-food fits in with this picture. The slightest neglect in this respect
-may produce in them the most violent outbreaks of affect and even
-induce fits. Most of them are unwilling to work, they wish to be
-supported and provided for like a child.</p>
-
-<p>It is here, therefore, not only a question, as Strümpell considers,
-of the production of illnesses on account of an actual gain (pension,
-compensation for injury, flight from the front) which are only secondary
-illness gains; the primary motive for the illness is the pleasure
-itself of remaining in the secure retreat of the childish situation once<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
-so unwillingly left behind. Both these narcissistic and apprehensive
-manifestations of illness have their atavistic prototype; it is even
-possible that the neurosis often reverts to methods of reaction which
-play no part at all in the individual development (feigning of death
-by animals, methods of progress and protection of the young of
-animals in the ancestral series). It is as though an over-strong affect
-could no longer be compensated along normal paths, but had to
-regress to previously abandoned but virtually existent mechanisms
-of reaction. I do not doubt that many other pathological reactions
-will yet be revealed as recapitulations of overcome methods of
-adaptation.</p>
-
-<p>As symptoms of the traumatic neuroses which are less appreciated,
-I might mention the over-sensitiveness of all the senses (shunning
-of light, hyperacusis, extreme ticklishness) and the anxiety dreams.
-The real terrors that have been experienced, or things similar to them,
-are lived through again and again in these dreams. I am following
-a hint of Freud’s when I look upon these terrors and anxiety dreams,
-as well as the state of terror by day, as spontaneous attempts of cure
-on the part of the patient. They serve to bring piecemeal to conscious
-abreaction the shock, which in its totality was intolerable and
-unintelligible and was therefore converted into symptoms, and to contribute
-to the adjustment of the disturbed equilibrium in the psychical
-economy.</p>
-
-<p>Ladies and gentlemen, I hope these few remarks of mine may
-serve as proof that the psycho-analytical conception discloses points
-of view where the rest of neurology leaves us in the lurch.</p>
-
-<p>From the methodical psycho-analysis of many cases we ought to
-expect the full explanation of these morbid conditions and perhaps
-also their radical cure.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span></p>
-
-<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
-<img src="images/i_p21.jpg" width="500" height="252" alt="" />
-</div>
-
-<p>While this article was in the press, I read the interesting work
-of Prof. E. Moro, the childrens’ specialist of Heidelberg, on “the first
-Trimenon”, <i>i. e.</i> the peculiarities of the first three months of the infant’s
-life. He says: “If one lays a young infant on a pillow on a table
-and strikes the pillow on either side with the hands, then there results
-a peculiar reflex action. Both arms are thrown up symmetrically apart
-and then come together again in a curve with easy tonic movements.
-A similar movement is carried out simultaneously by the legs”. We
-would say: Moro has here artificially produced a little shock (or traumatic)
-neurosis. The remarkable thing in this action is that this reflex
-to the shock in the young infant of less than three months old shows
-signs of the natural reflexes of clasping, which characterise the “carried
-offspring”, <i>i. e</i>. the young of animals (monkeys) which are compelled
-with the help of a pronounced clasping reflex to hold fast with the
-fingers to the mother’s fur while she climbs about the trees. We
-would say: Atavistic reversion of the method of reaction in sudden
-terror<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">4</a>.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>2. <span class="smcap">Dr. Karl Abraham</span>, Berlin.</h3>
-
-
-<p><span class="smcap">During</span> the war academic neurologists have come round more and
-more to regard the aetiology of the traumatic neuroses from psychological
-points of view. However, in spite of the approach towards our
-views, mentioned by Ferenczi, their ideas differ from ours in two
-respects, namely, they for the most part only take into consideration
-the reactions of the ego impulses to the trauma, and they keep entirely
-to the manifest expressions of the neurosis. In the following
-remarks, besides those factors which we do not dispute, I intend to
-deal with the unconscious and sexual ones.</p>
-
-<p>When in peace times psycho-analysis upheld the sexual aetiology
-of the neuroses it was often pointed out as a contrary argument that
-this could not hold good for the traumatic neuroses. Similarly now
-the opinion is expressed that the genesis of the war neuroses contravenes
-our ideas. Terror, anxiety lest the dangerous situation be
-repeated, seeking for a pension, and some vague idea of disposition
-are supposed to be adequate explanations of the illness; in the mass
-of the neuroses which have broken out during the war the unimportance
-of the sexual aetiology is thought to be clearly shown.</p>
-
-<p>My investigations of the traumatic neuroses in peace time had
-for a long time led me to conclude the importance of sexuality in
-them similar to that in the other neuroses, but they have not yet
-been sufficiently numerous and conclusive enough for publication.
-I might mention the case of a young girl who met with a slight tram
-accident when she was in the throes of a serious erotic conflict. The
-analysis showed that the accident in a certain measure gave a pretext
-for the outbreak of the neurosis. The symptoms were in connection
-with the conflict in question; the importance of the trauma receded
-quite into the background. I might also add that some litigious cases
-of traumatic neurosis which I observed in greater detail all suffered
-from impotence; this disturbance was produced by the accident,
-but seemed to have its real basis in old and unconscious sexual
-resistances.</p>
-
-<p>The investigation of war neurotics has fully confirmed my surmises
-connected with such observations. Moreover, the recurrence of
-certain definite symptoms in war neurotics, which were familiar to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>
-me not only in the traumatic neuroses of peace time, but also in the
-non-traumatic cases, seems to me worth noting. I refer particularly
-to the complex of symptoms which we could so often observe during
-the war in the anxiety cases with trembling, such as trembling, agitation,
-irritability, sensitiveness, sleeplessness, headaches, anxiety, depression
-of spirits and feelings of incompetency. Two neurotic types
-with the same symptoms—although these do not appear so prominently
-as in the war—would be the impotent man and the frigid
-woman. A similarity which is so marked in external phenomena leads
-one to expect a similarity also in internal processes.</p>
-
-<p>All my experience fully coincides with that which Ferenczi has
-just communicated. The trauma acts on the sexuality of many persons
-in the sense that it gives the impulse to a regressive alteration which
-endeavours to reach narcissism. I might add that we both arrived at
-this idea without having previously even mentioned it to one another.
-The trauma, however, has this effect only in a portion of those participating
-in the war, hence we are unable to dispense with the
-assumption of an individual disposition, but we are in the position
-to define it far more accurately than the prevailing school of neurology.
-A couple of examples will make the problem before us
-clearer.</p>
-
-<p>At the beginning of the war a soldier at the front was wounded
-on August, 12th, 1914. Before his wound was completely healed he
-secretly left the hospital and went again to the front, soon getting a
-second and after a few months a third wound. After repeated returns
-to the front he was one day blown up by a shell explosion and was
-unconscious for two days. After these four traumata he certainly
-presented the phenomena following upon shock, but no neurotic
-picture, being neither particularly anxious, depressed nor excited.
-Another man at the front during a night attack fell into a hole without
-injuring himself, but immediately developed neurotic trembling of a
-most severe kind, and presented the picture of a mental breakdown.
-How are such differences to be explained?</p>
-
-<p>The previous history of such people, and naturally, still more, a
-penetrating analysis, teaches us why the one in spite of the severest
-physical and mental influences of the war remains to all intents and
-purposes healthy, and why the other reacts to relatively trifling stimuli
-with a severe neurosis. It transpires with great regularity that the
-war neurotics already before the trauma were labile people—to
-designate it, to begin with, by a general expression—and especially
-so as regards their sexuality. Many of these men were unable to carry
-out their tasks in practical life, others that were capable of doing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
-this, however, showed little initiative and manifested little impelling
-energy. In all of them sexual activity was diminished, their sexual
-hunger (libido) being checked through fixations; in many of them
-already before the campaign potency was weak or they were only
-potent under certain conditions. Their attitude towards the female
-sex was more or less disturbed through partial fixation of the sexual
-hunger (libido) in the developmental stage of narcissism. Their sexual
-and social capacity of functioning was dependent on their making
-certain concessions to their narcissism.</p>
-
-<p>In the war these men were placed under completely changed conditions
-and in the face of extraordinary demands. They had always
-to be prepared for unconditional self-sacrifice in favour of the mass.
-This signifies the renunciation of all narcissistic privileges. The healthy
-person is able to accomplish such a complete suppression of his narcissism:
-he loves according to the transference type, and so is capable
-of sacrificing his ego for the whole. In this respect those disposed to
-neuroses are inferior to healthy persons.</p>
-
-<p>It is not only demanded of these men in the field that they must
-tolerate dangerous situations—a purely passive performance—but
-there is a second demand which has been much too little considered,
-I allude to the aggressive acts for which the soldier must be hourly
-prepared, for besides the readiness to die, the readiness to kill is demanded
-of him.</p>
-
-<p>A further factor which operates on the labile sexuality of those
-disposed to neuroses is the almost exclusive association with men.
-The sexuality of the normal person takes no harm from this, but it
-is otherwise in men with strong narcissistic traits. The knowledge of
-the connection between homosexuality and narcissism enables us to
-understand this.</p>
-
-<p>The previously unstable attitude towards women begins to waver
-under such conditions. If the lability of the attitude towards the other
-sex is very great then it does not need even a war trauma to cause
-a neurosis to break out in such men. For instance, I observed a man
-who on return from furlough at home had a convulsive attack and
-was brought into the hospital showing signs of anxiety and depression.
-The man had always been noted for his effeminate disposition, and in
-his married life was weakly potent and always inclined to jealousy.
-When he was home on leave he failed absolutely in the attempt to
-have sexual relations with his wife. His fears that his wife would be
-unfaithful to him reached a crisis, and soon after his departure from
-home he had his convulsive attack.</p>
-
-<p>Such men with labile heterosexual impulses need a support for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
-their sexuality. They frequently find this in their wife on whom their
-sexual hunger (libido) is completely dependent, or they have to defend
-themselves from their feelings of insecurity sexually by having constantly
-to convince themselves that they are potent by going with
-prostitutes. And so in war they constantly need a support for their
-wavering activity. Their military usefulness also is dependent upon
-conditions. They are frequently useful in rank and file, supporting
-their activity upon that of their comrades. A changed situation, and
-occurrence, which with a marked disposition needs only to be very
-trifling, upsets the balance, making the previously weakly-active man
-wholly passive. The passivity is expressed then not only in the sphere
-of the ego impulses, but likewise in that of the sexual impulses. The
-narcissism breaks out. The capability of the transference of the sexual
-hunger (libido) dies away as well as the capacity of self-sacrifice in
-favour of the community. On the contrary, we now have a patient
-before us who himself needs care and consideration on the part of
-others, who in a typically narcissistic manner is in constant anxiety
-about his life and health. The obtrusiveness of the symptoms (tremors,
-attacks, etc.) is also narcissistic. Many of the patients show themselves
-completely female-passive in the surrender to their suffering. In their
-symptoms they are experiencing anew the situation which had caused
-the neurosis to break out, and soliciting the sympathy of other
-people.</p>
-
-<p>At this juncture we must again refer to the previously mentioned
-circumstance that in our patients the anxiety as regards killing is of
-a similar significance to that of dying. The symptoms in part are only
-comprehensible in this sense. The case of a man who in the field suffered
-from a relapse of a neurosis which he had had six years previously
-is especially instructive. At that time he was taken with a tremor
-of his arm which arose in connection with a dream in which he
-murdered someone; a hand-to-hand fight in the field caused the old
-symptom to reappear. Hysterical convulsive attacks are not only produced
-through dangerous situations, terror, etc., but not infrequently
-an act of aggression which he has failed to carry out is expressed in
-them. Such an attack is especially often associated with an exchange
-of words with his superiors; the suppressed impulse to forcible activity
-finds in the expression its motor discharge.</p>
-
-<p>The complete instability of many war neurotics, their disconcerting
-depression, their propensity to thoughts of death, find a further
-explanation in a particular effect of the trauma. Many of the neurotically
-disposed persons, up to the moment when the trauma upsets
-them, have supported themselves only through an illusion connected<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
-with their narcissism, namely, through the belief in their immortality
-and invulnerability. The effect of an explosion, a wound, or things of
-a like nature suddenly destroys this belief. The narcissistic security
-gives way to a feeling of powerlessness and the neurosis sets in.</p>
-
-<p>To what an extent the regression can go is shown in those cases,
-described also in the literature, in which the patients display the
-conduct of little children. One of my patients who was previously
-neurotic was thrown into this kind of condition through the terrifying
-effect of a mine explosion. For a long time he behaved like a terrified
-little child. For many weeks he could only reply to all questions about
-his trouble with the two words, “Mine bombs”. He had therefore gone
-back to the mode of expression of a child hardly two years old.</p>
-
-<p>What apparently is an exception to the statement made at the
-commencement is the following noteworthy case in which a previously
-healthy, proficient and sexually completely potent young man was
-taken in the field with a severe astasia-abasia coupled with a very great
-over-excitability of affect. An explosion had hurled the lower part of
-his back against the side of the trench; he had therefore suffered a
-trauma, and had been already treated by various neurologists for
-“traumatic hysteria”. A careful physical examination showed me undoubted
-signs of an affection of the Conus Medullaris, manifestly a
-haematomyelia. The patient remembered that after the trauma he
-could not retain his urine and faeces, still he continued at his post
-because he looked upon this condition as the result of terror. These
-symptoms improved in the following weeks. However, during the same
-period he noticed the disappearance of all sexual feelings. At first
-he was not inclined to look upon this condition, which was disquietening
-to him, at all seriously, having no idea that he had an
-organic impotence. During leave at home he had to come to the
-conclusion that the sexual insensitiveness was in no way to be overcome.
-Now the neurosis appeared, not as the result of the psychic impression
-of the explosion, but as a reaction to the organic impotence of traumatic
-origin. This neurosis differed, by the way, from the usual traumatic
-neuroses through the euphoristic, at times even manic state of mind.</p>
-
-<p>This difference needs special appreciation and explanation. Also
-other men who have received severe organic injuries show such mental
-attitudes which must surprise us. For example, I have always found
-that in the amputation hospitals a strikingly cheerful mood prevails.
-At the beginning of the war I had my attention drawn to the euphoria
-of the severely wounded men by a particular occurrence. I had to
-treat four soldiers in a general hospital, who through the splintering
-of the same shell had had their eyes severely injured. All four had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
-already had enucleation performed in another hospital. They were in
-no way depressed but gave themselves up to a careless, serene frame
-of mind. When they—all at the same time—received their artificial
-eyes a remarkable scene took place. They jumped, danced, and
-laughed in boisterous spirits, just like children who work themselves
-up into a frenzy of joy. Also here there is without doubt a regression
-to narcissism, it is however of a more partial nature. These patients
-repress the knowledge that through the mutilation they have experienced
-a depreciation in a more or less high degree, especially in the
-eyes of the female sex. What they lose in love from outside they
-seek to compensate by means of self-love. The damaged part of the
-body receives for them a significance as an erotogenic zone which
-did not previously belong to it<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">5</a>.</p>
-
-<p>All the experiences here communicated speak unanimously in
-the sense that the war neuroses are not to be understood without
-taking the sexuality into consideration. This view receives a valuable
-confirmation by means of the mental disturbances observed in the
-war, which—like mental troubles in general—very often more
-easily manifest the latent content of their ideas than the neuroses. The
-mental disturbances which have broken out in the field, as other
-observers have confirmed, are associated only in a trifling part with
-the formation of delusions. However, if there is a delusion then it
-has even a manifest sexual content. In the cases I have seen the
-delusions are partly of jealousy, partly of homosexual persecution
-by comrades. I might mention the paranoid illness of a soldier which
-broke out when he, after long service in the field, went home on furlough
-and turned out to be impotent with his wife. A very transparent
-symbolism and other signs pointed with certainty to the significance
-of homosexual components as the fundamental cause of the delusion.
-Another man had the delusion of being, during sleep, infected with
-syphilis in the hospital by his comrades, the origin of the delusion
-was here also the result of imperfectly repressed homosexuality.</p>
-
-<p>In this connection I should like to mention another remarkable
-case. In 1915 when I was acting at a surgical station a man was treated
-there for a gunshot wound of the penis. The operation, which was carried
-out by a well known surgeon, was quite successful. Two years later
-the same patient came to my psychiatric station. The man who was
-previously unaffected psychically now showed a paranoid mental disturbance.
-On questioning him it appeared that in consequence of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>
-wound there existed entire genital anaesthesia. Also here the psychosis
-appeared to stand in close connection with the cessation of genital
-manliness.</p>
-
-<p>The so-called “seeking for pension” of many men injured in the
-war is as little explained by means of the current ideas on the matter
-as the symptoms of the neurosis. This also stands in connection with
-the alterations of the sexual hunger (libido), just as do the neurotic
-symptoms. The patient only apparently fights for compensation for
-the stiffened wrist, for the shot-off finger, for his neurotic trouble.
-It is quite overlooked as a rule that the neurotic inwardly perceives
-the alteration which has taken place as regards his sexual hunger
-(libido). He is filled with the feeling of an enormous injury. And he is
-so far right when he actually has suffered loss from his capability
-for transference of his sexual hunger (libido) and therewith an important
-basis of the belief in himself. A man injured by an accident before
-the war once told me that he had come to an agreement with
-his insurance company for a definite compensation. Hardly had this
-occurred when the thought came to him that this sum did not even
-remotely cover his actual injury. Henceforth the sum which according
-to his idea he ought to have claimed rapidly rose to an enormous
-amount. The pension compensates only for the diminution of the capacity
-for earning a livelihood, so far as this is objectively demonstrable, not
-for that which the patient subjectively feels; he cannot be compensated
-for his reduced capacity for object-love. Narcissism also explains here
-the conduct of the patients. Where previously the capability of surrender
-(in every sense of the word) existed, now the narcissistic avarice dominates.
-The genital zone has lost its predominance; anal erotism is strengthened.
-It is clear that the state pension favours the development of
-the character traits described; this only takes place, however, when the
-tendency already exists in the injured person to react narcissistically
-to an external injury to his integrity.</p>
-
-<p>Now as regards the question of the therapy and particularly that
-of the psycho-analytic.</p>
-
-<p>At the commencement of the war one took little notice of the
-neurotics, they were placed perchance in a convalescent home but
-practically without treatment. The increasing number of neurotic cases
-necessitated other measures. The old method of “surprisal” was again
-dug up. Then came the period of “active” curative procedures, the best
-known of which is Kaufmann’s. These methods were at first deceptive
-from the fact that they led to the rapid improvement of a great
-number of patients. As regards, however, the duration of the cure,
-they have not yielded what was hoped of them, and, in addition,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
-they produced certain unwished-for phenomena. The military medical
-authorities therefore display a lively interest in putting on one side
-the too “active” methods in favour of other effective but less
-severe ones.</p>
-
-<p>Is psycho-analysis able to step into the breach? Theoretically we
-are justified in assuming that it is, because psycho-analysis alone of
-all methods of treatment is a causal one. We also have already practical
-experience to go upon; I refer to the publications of Simmel. I will
-now briefly speak of my own therapeutic experiences. We psycho-analysts
-had to be extremely cautious in our treatment of war neuroses,
-for the addresses at medical congresses and the literature before the
-war had demonstrated very clearly the refusal of the medical profession
-to accept the conclusions of our ideas and efforts. When in 1916 I
-founded a station for neuroses and mental diseases I abstained entirely
-from all forcible therapy, likewise from hypnosis and other suggestive
-means, but allowed the patients to abreact in the waking state
-and sought to make intelligible to them by a kind of simplified psycho-analysis
-the origin and nature of their suffering. I aimed at arousing
-in the patients the feeling of being understood, complete relaxation,
-and improvement. Later the station became that of a pure observation
-station, chiefly for mental diseases; hence I could only collect isolated
-therapeutic experiences.</p>
-
-<p>The objection that psycho-analysis works too slowly does not
-hold good as far as our experience goes up to the present.</p>
-
-<p>Latterly it has appeared that the patients treated accordingly by
-the Kaufmann method frequently relapsed when they were withdrawn
-from the influence of the doctor, or were again exposed to the dangers
-of the front. Time will show whether the psycho-analytic methods will
-procure more lasting cures. I will communicate in conclusion the result,
-instructive in this connection, of the recent treatment of a neurosis
-carried out in my private practice. I was able in a few weeks to remove
-a severe phobia in a boy twelve years old, which referred to air raids.
-The cure persisted when the boy returned home; he was there again
-daily exposed to the risk of air raids and put up with this situation
-just like a healthy person. Perhaps this result justifies the expectation
-that psycho-analysis will in fact in the permanence of its cures fill up
-the gaps that exist at present. Psycho-analysis, which enables us to
-penetrate deeper than any other method into the structure of the war
-neuroses, will perhaps take therapeutic precedence also in the sphere
-of the war neuroses<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">6</a>.</p>
-
-<hr />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span></p>
-
-<h3>3. <span class="smcap">Dr. Ernst Simmel</span>, Berlin.</h3>
-
-
-<p><span class="smcap">For</span> the past eighteen months I have been in charge of a special
-hospital for war neuroses, and the mass treatment necessary in such
-an institution has enabled me to make a comparative study of the
-different so-called psycho-therapeutic methods. Apart from the serious
-objections that can be raised with regard to all forcible and restrictive
-methods, which for the most part produce new psychic injuries, there
-are serious doubts as to the use of pure suggestion in the form of
-hypnosis when carried out indiscriminately as a blind technique for
-war neurotics. The removal of the symptom, which is done regardless
-of the remaining psychic constellations of the patient, generally
-produces at the same time a considerable general disturbance with
-marked subjective symptoms, such as headache, feelings of pressure
-on the head, insomnia, diminution of intellectual capacity, sexual
-impotence, etc.</p>
-
-<p>On the other hand, the frequently observed fact that with the
-disappearance of the manifest symptom the neurosis appears in another
-form, has proved that with all these kinds of palliative measures the
-root cause of the suffering has not been touched.</p>
-
-<p>A medical treatment that is to be effective can only be built up
-on the pathogenesis of a disease. The psycho-pathogenesis of the war
-neurosis, (and no intelligent man any longer doubts its psychic origin),
-obviously can be elucidated only by means of psycho-analysis. It is
-intelligible that a hospital regime necessitating the simultaneous treatment
-of a large number of cases and calling for rapid curative results,
-would allow a more extensive individual analysis only in a few cases.
-On account of this I had from the beginning to cut down the length
-of the treatment. A combination of analytical-cathartic hypnosis with
-analytical conversations during the waking state, and dream interpretation
-carried out both in the waking state and in deep hypnosis,
-has given me a method which on an average of two or three sittings
-brought about relief of the symptoms. This mode of treatment implies
-a systematic investigation of the symptoms that have appeared in
-consequence of the incongruity of the war experience and the psychic
-preparedness of the patient; such investigation being both aetiologically
-conditioned as to its nature and automatically effective as to its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
-working. With the disappearance of the symptoms the essential treatment
-of the war neurotics, according to modern hospital methods,
-was looked upon as being at an end. An analytical cure of the entire
-personality by a shortened and combined method will have to be
-reserved for the psychological clinic of the future.</p>
-
-<p>The psycho-analytical explanation of the war neuroses has proved
-with wonderful clearness the correctness of the Freudian views on
-hysteria, according to which all physical symptoms represent conversions
-of something psychical. The body is the instrument of the
-mind upon which it (the mind) allows its unconscious to manifest
-itself in plastic and mimic expression. The functions of the unconscious
-are the deciding factor in the formation and building up of the war
-neuroses, also the frequently observed instances of the forgetting of
-events accompanied by feelings hostile to the ego, even when these
-events are very recent, permits us to recognise from the outside
-alone the submergence and repression of ideas and affects of a painful
-nature. It is comprehensible that under the pressure of years of
-discipline, which limits the personality and thereby prevents every
-individual reaction to events, the disposition to repression is extraordinarily
-favoured. To what degree an enforced sexual abstinence
-further increases this could not be tested.</p>
-
-<p>The unconscious meaning of the <em>symptoms</em> of the war neurotics,
-as we may state by anticipation, is for the most part of a non-sexual
-nature, there being exhibited in them all those war-produced affects
-of terror, anxiety, rage, etc. associated with ideas corresponding with
-the actual occurrences of the war. Stekel is quite wrong in concluding
-from my statements that I categorically deny a sexual basis for neuroses
-in general, since at present only the <em>symptomatology</em> of the war
-neuroses is explained on the basis of these analytical investigations.
-The fact of the predisposition to neuroses is still a long way from
-being exhausted. The fact that in the midst of the self-same experiences
-one soldier remains well while another becomes a neurotic may, so
-far as my experience goes, be very well connected with the psycho-sexual
-constellation of the particular person. The systematic investigation
-of the dream-life of the soldier, even after the removal of the
-war neurotic symptoms, has indeed made it possible to recognise
-quite frequently threads that lead down to the primordial network of
-infantile sexuality. Also many soldiers who have broken down solely
-under the pressure of discipline show even in this abortive form of
-analysis an attitude of father defiance in consequence of an infantile
-mother fixation as the subconscious condition of their need for
-opposition. In some cases even the sexual trauma of childhood be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>comes
-evident as the latent basis of the war neurosis just in the
-quick and deep view which is gained by hypnosis in the combined
-form of treatment. The war affects and ideas which form the symptoms
-have, on the other hand, a certain intrinsic relation to sexuality
-inasmuch as they are closely bound with the most primitive instincts
-in man,—those connected with the self-preservation instinct. If the
-sexual affect in the last resort originates in the instinct which is
-directed towards the preservation of the species, the affects of anxiety,
-horror, rage, etc. produced by the war are connected with the elementary
-urging of the preservation of the individual, and not, as
-superficial observers imagine, solely for the purpose of preserving
-the physical existence, but above all that of the psychic existence.</p>
-
-<p>The war neuroses are essentially interposed guarantees, the object
-of which is to protect the soldier against a psychosis. Anyone who
-has examined a great number of patients for eighteen months with
-perception that has been analytically sharpened, must recognise that
-the proportionately small number of war psychoses is only to be
-explained by the proportionately large number of war neuroses.</p>
-
-<p>One must have experienced the war occurrences themselves or
-their recapitulation under analytical-cathartic hypnosis in order to
-understand to what attacks the mental life of a man is exposed in
-time of war. For instance, a man after being wounded several times
-has to return to the front, or is separated from important events in
-his family for an indefinite time, or finds himself exposed irretrievably
-to that murderous monster, the tank, or to an enemy gas attack
-which is rolling towards him; again, shot and wounded by shrapnel
-he has often to lie for hours or days among the gory and mutilated
-bodies of his comrades, and, not least of all, his self-respect is sorely
-tried by unjust and cruel superiors who are themselves dominated
-by complexes, yet he has to remain calm and mutely allow himself
-to be overwhelmed by the fact that he has no individual value, but
-is merely one unimportant unit of the whole.</p>
-
-<p>It is now explicable why the war neurosis of the officer does not
-generally exhibit such gross symptoms as that of the ordinary soldier.
-The officer has raised himself above the crowd, and, with a higher
-mental development, has more possibilities of individually sublimating
-his own particular injuries. Nevertheless, the neuroses in officers will
-claim our psycho-therapeutic treatment in a far higher degree as
-soon as our colleagues agree not to look upon them from moral standpoints
-and to consider their comrades of the officer class under the
-courtesy diagnoses of Neurasthenia, Ischia, Neuralgia, etc.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The war neurosis, like the peace neurosis, is the expression of a
-splitting of the personality. The conditions for such a splitting are
-brought about by the consistent narrowing of the personality complex
-as a result of the compulsory discipline and above all by the psychic
-and physical exhaustion of one or more years of war. The soldier
-severely burdened with undischarged mental material is compelled to
-meet abnormally heavy demands. An accident or a disastrous event
-then causes the obstructed personality to break down. Complexes
-with accentuated feelings held down in the unconscious become unduly
-powerful, and the neurosis becomes manifest. The passage from
-the psychical to the physical, however, signifies here more than a
-self-preserving process of the psyche. The act of falling ill is, in my
-opinion, at the same time the commencement of the healing process.
-The consistent use of analytic hypnosis has repeatedly shown that
-the physical symptoms in their mute expression strive to bring to
-the notice of the man the elements that are disturbing his personality
-and which are imprisoned and obstructed in his unconscious. Since
-the union between conscious and unconscious is interrupted within
-by the strong barrier of the resistance, a detour by way of external
-physical paths is necessary in order to re-establish the harmonious
-fitting together of the personality.</p>
-
-<p>If the predominant physical symptoms of the war neuroses are
-modes of expression of unconsciously determined ideas, the more
-psychic forms of these neuroses, the states of inhibition or excitement,
-are due to an effort on the part of the repressed affects to re-establish
-the disturbed psychic balance. A strict demarcation between aetiologically
-effective ideas and sensations is naturally not conceivable.
-The relationship can only be a quantitative one. All ideas obviously
-stand in a quite special relationship to the ego of the patient through
-their accentuation of feelings; on the other hand, the affects are bound
-to their causative ideas.</p>
-
-<p>The first part of our mental analytic therapy is to recognise the
-meaning of the neurotic healing tendency, the second, to convey our
-knowledge to the patient. The crowning point of our treatment consists
-in securing the spontaneous cooperation of the neurotic who, freed of
-his emotional inhibition, and now in harmony with himself, has, through
-his wider mental field of vision, a greater scope for the activity of
-his will power. Man can only desire what he knows. By reason of
-this the analyst comes to realise that the diagnosis, “mala voluntas”,
-which so often brings the doctor who is untrained in analysis into
-conflict with his patient, mostly betokens a “mala potentia” of the
-doctor who knows nothing about the functions of the unconscious.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The weakening of the personality complexes of the soldier, as
-just described, his subjection to other ideas with accentuated feelings
-which are held down in the subconscious and thus connected with the
-constant readiness to subordination under the strivings of ego-hostile
-feelings, represents the so-called morbid suggestibility. To make use
-of this suggestibility for curative purposes without exposing its foundations
-is to increase the illness instead of bringing about a cure.</p>
-
-<p>The neurotic, in my opinion, succumbs in the first instance to
-auto-suggestion, that is to say, to over-strong emotionally toned ideas
-which have arisen in him at a time when the ego-complex is weakened
-in power or completely suspended.</p>
-
-<p>According to my observations, narrowings and suppressions of
-consciousness represent the initial stages of the war neuroses. In the
-smallest loss of consciousness, the shock effects of terror, up to the
-severe fainting attacks and the long continued loss of consciousness
-after being buried, we see the self-conscious of the personality more
-or less obliterated and the way opened to the unconscious. Here undoubtedly
-at the commencement are operating those teleological mechanisms
-which constitute the foundation of the neuroses and their formation
-of symptoms. Consciousness refuses to take up ideas or to assimilate
-at the moment those things which are too horrible in their reality to
-be consciously tolerated. Therefore those psychic shocks, those fainting
-attacks and profound loss of consciousness denote, provided there is
-no injury <em>in cerebro</em>, a power of the unconscious that attracts to itself
-the entire psychosis in a salutary manner.</p>
-
-<p>Hypnosis gives us a clear picture of these processes. It shows us
-the patient in the same state of consciousness as that in which during
-the war he had acquired the origin of the illness. During hypnosis
-the soldier relates, or once again lives through, all the things that
-he had experienced in former circumstances only unconsciously. We
-learn of distressing pains of which, when he was buried, he never
-became conscious. In such a hypnosis we see his anxiety displayed,
-his anger arise, feelings which at the moment of the excitation were
-benumbed and like lightning were dragged violently into the unconscious.</p>
-
-<p>I can best illustrate what I have said by a few examples. For instance,
-the simplest cases, which occurred so often, of a flaccid paralysis
-of the arm after a slight gunshot wound that had been well
-healed for a long time and which seemed to be of a purely physical
-nature, showed its unconscious connections very quickly in one sitting.
-Consciousness only knows, “I cannot move my arm”, and no
-amount of reasoning was of any avail. However, the unconscious spoke<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
-during hypnosis: “In the excitement of the attack my mind became
-a blank. When I was hit the impact of the shrapnel was so great
-that my arm felt as though it was pulled violently backwards, and I
-immediately thought it was torn off”. The correction of the unconscious
-idea in hypnosis which again united the idea of the torn off
-arm with consciousness here quickly settled the question of an organic
-basis of the symptom, It can be easily understood that an arm
-which is no longer recognised as existing is also completely
-analgesic.</p>
-
-<p>The neurotic symptoms which owe their origin to such suddenly
-occurring events we can consequently regard in their effects as realised
-post-hypnotic auto-suggestions. I have confirmed this view by
-numerous examples, I might mention the case of a soldier who suffered
-from a severe facial tic by which he was constantly making a
-grimace, and who at the same time had a contracture of the right
-knee joint, both of which symptoms had proved quite refractory to
-the usual treatment by suggestion. Hypnosis, which restored the conscious
-situation of the initial blowing up, very soon yielded the following
-information. While the patient lay unconscious under a wreckage
-of stones and while scenes of his native place appeared to him as in
-a dream, he was constantly compelled to make grimaces in order to
-remove the mass of sand which lay on his face and also for the purpose
-of breathing freely. At the same time a sharp stone was pressing
-on his right heel which compelled him to keep his leg bent. This
-compulsion which was united with unconscious ideas acted therefore
-as a post-hypnotic suggestion for more than a year afterwards, until
-at last the command which the unconscious had imposed on the patient
-could be annulled during hypnosis by means of my correction. In
-this way was the removal of these symptoms brought about. I could
-quote further similar examples in which these kinds of contractures
-represent a compulsory holding of a part in a position of ease which
-is based on unconscious sensations of pain.</p>
-
-<p>Apart from repressed physical sensations of pain the affects themselves
-also naturally play an important part in the neurotic compulsion
-to maintain a particular position, I remember a soldier who for
-several months had a compulsion to keep both eyes fixed and turned
-upwards and to the left. This symptom failed to react to methods of
-suggestion. Analysis under hypnosis within a few minutes gave the
-explanation and at the same time the removal of the symptom. The
-patient had anxiously expected the falling down of trunks of trees
-from above and to the left through the bursting of shells during a
-drum fire. His eyes became fixed in dread before the fate threatening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
-him. The original situation had in the meantime become unreal, nevertheless
-the anxiety in itself was valid. The patient was still a soldier
-and retained in his neurosis the anxiety—an anxiety of similar situations.
-The neurosis of another soldier, which for a long time had
-been considered of an organic nature, a bulbar paralysis being suspected,
-was very instructive and the success of the treatment most gratifying.
-This man in addition to an apparently harmless superficial
-gunshot wound of the back suffered from a spasm of the muscles of
-the throat, a dysphagia, that made it impossible for him to take solid
-food, while liquid food was only possible in small quantities. The
-spasm of the throat and muscles of mastication turned out to be
-“suppressed rage”. This soldier who was cut off when on patrol was
-stealing alone through a wood when he saw a comrade being ill-treated
-by Frenchmen on the main road. This scene he reproduced fully
-and dramatically under hypnosis in which he stealthily crawled about,
-ground his teeth together and gnashed them in impotent rage over
-the scene which he had witnessed. At that time he was struck in the
-back by a chance shot which caused him to faint for a short time.
-He then succeeded in getting back to his company and was sent into
-hospital on account of his superficial wound. The living through this
-scene again with its accompanying emotions completely freed him
-from his dysphagia. This example also shows how repressed rage
-manifests itself as a more positive feeling tone through physical increase
-of tonus in contrast to the previously described cases with
-negative and depressed accentuation of feelings which are physically
-represented by a lowering of tone and in flaccid paralyses. Here an
-opportunity may be taken of alluding to the fact that one can demonstrate
-without difficulty during hypnosis the displacement from the
-psychical into the physical. If we interrupt the patient in the abreaction
-of his rage during hypnosis then he reacts with a general tremor
-or the tremor of an extremity which is already in some way psychically
-affected.</p>
-
-<p>Further I might mention the case of a neurotic who suffered
-from a shaking tremor of the right arm with peculiar circular movements
-of the thumb and fore-finger. This tremor had been removed
-by pure suggestive methods, but one morning it returned, as the
-patient expressed it “by itself”. On closer questioning he remembered
-that the shaking had re-appeared in conjunction with a terrifying
-dream during the previous night; the actual content of the dream
-he had forgotten. During hypnosis the patient immediately became
-conscious again of the dream, and by means of it of those events
-which still compelled him to shake his arm. During the night he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
-dreamed of a Russian with a black beard who sprang on to his bed
-in order to strangle him. He awoke in anxiety and terror with his
-arm shaking. The patient had seen the face of this Russian appear
-over the parapet during a furious hand grenade fight just when he
-was on the point of fixing a grenade fuse and was suddenly blown
-over. He lost consciousness with his rage undischarged and an
-incipient movement which served as a mimic abreaction of this
-anger.</p>
-
-<p>From this example, to which I could add many more, it becomes
-evident that dream material directly forces itself on the attention of
-the intelligent psycho-therapeutists as of great assistance in the treatment
-of war neuroses.</p>
-
-<p>I do not treat any patients whose dreams I do not know. I have
-learnt for a long time now to estimate the dreams of my war neurotic
-patients as an attempt at self-healing, especially in the psycho-cathartic
-sense. I never give drugs for the dreams of anxiety, terror and rage.
-I am glad of the cooperation of the patient, I learn by listening to
-his dreams his own tendency to cure, then I get him to continue
-the dream under hypnosis where it has stopped the previous night,
-or, this I have several times found successful, I cause the patient to
-continue in his dreams at night from where the hypnosis has left off.
-Incidentally it may be remarked that after all these experiences I look
-upon hypnosis not as an artificial sleep but as a definite stage of
-natural sleep, which by virtue of its artificial induction enables one
-to maintain a direct rapport with the sleeper.</p>
-
-<p>The initial stage of auto-hypnosis, hypnosis, and dreams represents
-the same <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">niveau</em> as that in which the germs of the illness lie embedded
-and can be removed.</p>
-
-<p>In corroboration of this view I might mention a patient who was
-in a stuporose condition, with paralysis of all the limbs, and who was
-also almost deaf and dumb. By means of suggestion <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en masse</em>, <i>i.e</i>.
-when lying down among other patients who were being hypnotised,
-it at length became possible to hypnotise him. Even then the patient
-remained completely stuporose. Only when his sister succeeded in
-getting from him a few words concerning an anxiety dream, and
-after I had repeated these words to him during hypnosis did marked
-excitation take place in the stuporose man. The unconscious became
-sensitised and with effective discharge came the recapitulation of the
-causative occurrence. The patient having been forced by some jealous
-and stronger companions to drag along some branches of trees was
-overturned into a mass of mud in which he threatened to suffocate.
-The subconscious idea was that his mouth and ears were filled with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>
-mud and his limbs pressed into it. During hypnosis he cleared away
-this imaginary mud with all his might.</p>
-
-<p>There are, on the other hand, patients who inversely take over
-the impulse for curative discharge from the hypnosis into the dream.
-A young lieutenant assisted thus very practically in the reduction of
-his pent-up affects. For weeks after being blown up he was mentally
-deranged and delirious, and still suffered from states of excitement
-being unable to carry out the simplest intellectual processes, such as
-counting, reading, etc. After the first hypnosis which brought
-about a recapitulation of the most recent occurrences with a corresponding
-discharge of affect, there followed an intense fury dream.
-The patient wrenched out several iron bars from his bed and battered
-the wall with them. In the dream he was striking a canal worker with
-them whom he had seen daily from the window of the hospital. The
-conversation next morning showed that the canal worker had the
-features of an orderly who had wanted to detain him in the field
-hospital and thus prevent him going back to the front to avenge his
-brother. The patient’s brother had recently been killed whilst serving
-in the same regiment, and the lieutenant had been fighting with fury
-and grief in order to avenge him when he was blown up. His first
-delirious attack had been directed against this particular orderly.</p>
-
-<p>Sometimes one succeeded in directly stimulating the self-treatment
-of the patient in the dream. I recollect a neurotic who suffered from
-a severe disturbance of speech and also of walking, the result of a
-spastic paralysis of the legs and muscles of the mouth in consequence
-of a strong repression of rage. The discharge which took place under
-hypnosis was so dangerous to those in the vicinity that I had prematurely
-to break off the treatment. However, before waking the
-patient I told him to discharge the unreleased part in his dream.
-I let him sleep alone with an orderly. In the middle of the night he
-sprang up and again lived through an experience of anxiety and rage
-accompanied with shouting and raving, and although previously
-paralysed he ran down the whole length of the staircase of the
-hospital.</p>
-
-<p>An especially frequent symptom in the war neuroses—the convulsive
-attacks—directly represents, in my opinion, an auto-hypnotic
-state appearing in the form of an attack.</p>
-
-<p>Being buried (as the result of an explosion) with its total obliteration
-of the conscious ego, naturally the most frequent originator
-of the war neuroses, acts most often as the first cause. The loss of
-consciousness during the convulsive attack and the subsequent amnesia
-is that beneficent not-knowing into which the neurotic person flies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>
-before the memory of that all too horrible situation, or before the
-knowledge of some act of his own which he may have to perform as
-a result of his affective damming-up, but which nevertheless brings
-him into grave danger. I have already in my earlier work alluded
-to the fact that the physical form of expression of the convulsion
-varies according to its unconscious symbolic meaning. The most
-frequent form of the convulsion simply represents a repetition of
-those defence movements which the patient made when he was
-threatened with being shattered when he was buried. The convulsive
-attacks always take place when the ideas regarding those events are
-subconscious, and the strongly repressed affects which are bound to
-them, are associatively stimulated. A door slammed, a thunder-clap,
-a distant shot, makes the patient break down, and his previously
-unconscious anxiety idea becomes over-weighted. Terror and dread
-of death here generally form the primary basis for the dissociation
-of the psyche and for the attack-like mastery of the conscious by
-the unconscious.</p>
-
-<p>A soldier who has once been paralysed for a time through the
-emotion of terror in his conscious ego is in many ways no longer
-in the position to satisfy consciously the repression which the pressure
-of discipline demands. It is almost always the anger towards his
-superiors which brings on further convulsive attacks. During hypnosis,
-which lifts the curtain of this originally hallucinated dream-action
-during the attack, we see again and again the patient struggling with
-his highest superiors. He strikes, bites, stabs and shoots them, treads
-them under foot with terrible oaths. He here lets free the fiercest
-instincts against persons who restrained his conscious ego.</p>
-
-<p>It is quite explicable why these kinds of attacks before they come
-for treatment are often associated with mutism. The patient denies
-himself in a certain degree the faculty of speech, because he is afraid
-of speaking certain words that might bring misfortune upon him.</p>
-
-<p>In one case I succeeded even without hypnosis in directly making
-use of the convulsive attacks of the patient for treatment. I was able
-to become <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en rapport</em> with the patient in the attack so that he
-informed me about the events which he actually hallucinated during
-the single convulsive attack.</p>
-
-<p>The sphere of the purely psychic war injuries without any physical
-signs which can be treated in this way is also great. I mentioned
-above a case of stupor. It is quite comprehensible that it is more
-particularly the mental inhibitory phenomena which are accessible to
-this treatment, because the cessation of mental processes is brought
-about through an accumulation of affect which entirely owes its origin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
-to definite war occurrences. The psycho-catharsis as a foundation for
-a further analytic treatment here works wonders.</p>
-
-<p>I will take this opportunity of mentioning that as regards the
-war neurotic an abreaction by means of words is mostly not sufficient
-in this compressed form of treatment. The soldier is under the suggestion
-of the deed “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. His
-overburdened subconscious now is freed by means of an acted
-abreaction. On account of this I have for a long time proceeded to
-construct an upholstered dummy against which the neurotic fighting
-in his primitive human instinct victoriously frees himself.</p>
-
-<p>The neuroses of anxiety and terror, so far as they have become
-manifest through war experiences, can be treated successfully.
-Nevertheless, it is to be noted that also in the feeling of guilt of the
-war neurotic not only are real, specific and complex conditioned war
-atrocities the inner kernel, but that things experienced only in
-phantasy may be important.</p>
-
-<p>One of the most frequent war psycho-neurotic symptoms represents
-what after all is comprehensible without anything further, loss of
-memory. It may extend over a limited period of the war or over the
-whole of it, or even into pre-war times. The whole memory is blotted
-out in order that definite things should not be brought to mind.
-When these have once become conscious by means of the dream or
-hypnosis, and are pondered over, the tendency of the unconscious is
-robbed of its objects and the memory is again automatically re-introduced.</p>
-
-<p>The frequent loss of other intellectual capabilities likewise is
-mostly made good after sufficient discharge of affect. It is easy to
-understand that just those capabilities which represent the person’s
-highest art of sublimation, like artistic ones, would particularly suffer
-through the war experiences. Thus, a not unknown painter when a
-recruit in the war lost his ability for colour perception. My suggestion
-during hypnosis that he should at night dream in a picture the subconscious
-circumstances of his illness and then sketch it next day he
-promptly carried out and therewith contributed to the removal of a
-symptom which meant so much to him.</p>
-
-<p>Regarding the condition of excitement and frenzy which I have
-had ample opportunity of treating, I need say nothing further after
-what has been said concerning the convulsive attacks. They represent
-the positive side to the negative one of the convulsions. They are
-evoked by association and refer in the direction of their affects to
-definite persons or events that in a characteristic manner have more
-or less been forgotten by the patients. The nature of the associative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
-production often enables one to recognise the typical neurotic displacement,
-a projection outwards. There are numerous patients of this kind
-who readily have an attack of rage at the sight of an officer’s shoulder
-knot or a doctor’s overall, because they once had had to repress their
-rage against a definite officer or doctor by whom they had psychically
-felt themselves ill-used. A word further concerning the psychic illness
-of the genuine pension neurosis. Here again the interpretation of dreams
-particularly during hypnosis enables us to decide whether we are dealing
-with a genuine war psycho-neurosis or the frequently falsely accused
-conscious “ideas of covetousness”. I have found that the real pension
-neurosis represents a kind of inferiority neurosis. The patient values
-himself higher than he feels he is valued by his environment. He has
-generally, in his opinion, performed some special military achievement.
-He has counted on a distinction or at least a certain promotion which
-he does not attain. An illness or wound finally raises him above the
-general mass of the unknown, and now the pension is the substitute
-for the missing iron cross or the lance corporal’s button with which
-the patient endeavours to prove his particular value in opposition to
-the state.</p>
-
-<p>It can be understood that relapses occur in what is on the whole
-a comparatively hasty treatment. However, with the help of the pure
-analytic method described the character of the relapse can be established
-without difficulty. Frequently it is solely a question of the
-patients getting into the old surroundings through re-employment by
-the military to which they are not psychically equal, and from which
-they have escaped with the help of their neurosis, and now they in
-defence react with a relapse.</p>
-
-<p>On the other hand, it can frequently be established that the treatment
-on account of its shortness has not removed all the unconscious
-material. I might mention as an example a soldier who had suffered
-from states of excitement and convulsive attacks. After two treatments
-the states of excitement disappeared and within four weeks the attacks
-had ceased. The patient had to be discharged in spite of the fact that
-he still seemed somewhat distressed. After a few months he came
-back into the hospital on account of a recurrence of the attacks. In
-the treatment carried out when he had first been admitted into the
-hospital only those things came to light which were connected with
-his being blown up. During hypnosis on his second admission the
-patient said that he still had the feeling as though “someone was behind
-him”. This feeling of anxiety often increased so terribly that
-he would have a convulsive attack. In this attack he constantly saw
-a dead Russian in a white shirt who threateningly demanded back a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
-gold ring which the patient had taken from the Russian after killing
-him. This occurrence the patient had completely forgotten, but after
-I had talked it over with him when he was awake he became changed,
-alert and keen to work, and was now permanently cured of his
-convulsions.</p>
-
-<p>These theoretical points which I have supported by means of
-practical examples will suffice for a primary representation of the
-symptomatology of the war neuroses. It is impossible within the compass
-of this contribution, with the abundance of material at my disposal,
-to represent the numerous forms of the neuroses not mentioned
-here, and still further as regards their unconscious conditionality.</p>
-
-<p>In conclusion I should like to give a short description of the neurosis
-of a young civil servant, which despite the brevity of the treatment
-revealed with classical clearness a modified picture of the
-nature of the neurotic predisposition and the actual outbreak of the
-illness.</p>
-
-<p>This illness, when looked at from the outside, seemed to be a
-complete war neurosis without any kind of “civilian” origin. The
-patient had been for a long time in the field and constantly in the
-front line and had been exposed to extraordinary hardships. He had
-been wounded and only fell ill with his neurosis after being blown
-up twice. He had a severe impediment in his speech in consequence
-of an almost complete intention spasm of his lips, combined with
-states of excitement and rage, and attacks of loss of consciousness.
-The first conversation showed that all the physical disabilities signified
-nothing to the patient, on the contrary, he was completely broken
-down in mind and body through his struggles and friction with his
-superiors. In the first dream the patient received a letter, which to
-his unbounded rage his father had already opened, so that the red
-lining to the envelope hung in shreds. In the hypnosis the patient
-during the reading aloud of this dream underwent an extraordinary
-state of excitation, in which he re-experienced his last blowing up
-with unspeakable anxiety and terror. The red envelope lining was the
-torn out jaw bone of a dear friend and comrade who had been shattered
-beside him at that explosion. His relation to his father came out,
-with anger at the thought that he (the father) did not esteem all the
-great performances which he had accomplished in the field and communicated
-to him. The next dream after this hypnosis brought up a
-scene between the father and son. The father in the robe of the public
-prosecutor forbade his son, according to the law, to speak with some
-women imprisoned and kept in an underground dungeon. The son<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>
-started up in anger and said that he had his own law book which lay
-by one of those women. He went to get it and wandered through
-underground passages. He found in several rooms earlier loved women,
-but not his law book. At last he came into the last room and on the
-threshold his mother met him in her nightdress.</p>
-
-<p>I do not think I need to add many words to this audience to
-arrive at the interpretation. The patient fulfilled his “law” when he
-volunteered for the war, in order to put himself over his father
-through his manliness and obtain his mother. The symbol of the
-envelope, which, destined for the son, was unjustly opened by the father,
-is clear in its significance. It is peculiar and interesting how in this
-letter, which contained for the patient the secret of his life, is shown
-in combined representation the uninterrupted connection of the origin
-and outbreak of the neurosis—from the female genitals to the corpse
-of the shattered friend, to the memory of the last complete breakdown
-of the ego through the explosion.</p>
-
-<p>I have come to the end of my remarks, and hope that I have
-proved that the combined psycho-analytical method gives us to-day
-a true medical treatment for war neurotics. Those doctors who have
-devised a system of tortures, such as hunger cures, dark rooms,
-prohibition of letters, painful electric currents, etc. in order to extort
-from the patients the abandonment of their neurotic symptoms, unconsciously
-recognise the Freudian theory by the inversion of its
-fundamental principles. They make a torture of the treatment in order
-to force the neurotic “to flee into health”. The doctor schooled in
-psycho-analysis does not need to hound in the opposite direction his
-patients who have been driven into illness. He releases him from the
-fetters of his unconscious mind and thus is in the position to guide
-the neurotic into health and save him.</p>
-
-<hr />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span></p>
-
-<h2>III.<br />
-
-WAR SHOCK AND FREUD’S THEORY OF THE
-NEUROSES<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">7</a></h2>
-
-<p class="center">By<br />
-
-<span class="smcap">Dr. Ernest Jones</span>, London.</p>
-
-
-<p><span class="smcap">A matter</span> that used to hamper the opponents of psycho-analysis
-to some extent was that there was no alternative theory of the neuroses
-seriously tenable. It was clearly impossible to explain all neurotic
-manifestations by the catch-word use of the two terms “heredity” and
-“suggestion”, for our conceptions of heredity, however important in
-this connection they may well become in the future when more is
-known of the subject, are at present too vague to explain any complex
-psychological phenomena, and the idea of suggestion merely introduces
-yet another problem without solving any of the old ones.</p>
-
-<p>The experience of neurotic affections engendered by the war,
-however, has enabled the critics of psycho-analysis to put forward
-the view that the factors invoked by Freud in explanation of these
-affections need not be present, and therefore cannot be regarded as
-essential, in the way maintained by him, whereas, on the other hand,
-a different set of factors is undeniably present and operative; not
-only so, but these latter factors are held to be all-sufficing, so that
-it is not necessary to search for any others in the ætiology of the
-conditions in question. Some opponents of psycho-analysis, particularly
-those more concerned with combating an unwelcome theory than with
-ascertaining truth, have even maintained that the experience of the war
-has proved <em>all</em> Freud’s views to be utterly untenable and false.</p>
-
-<p>It would be easy to criticise the standpoint thus adopted, though
-that is in no sense my purpose here. Two points alone may be raised.
-If, as some writers assert, the strain of war conditions is in itself
-sufficient to account for the development of a psychoneurosis without
-the introduction of any other factor, then how is one to explain the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
-actual incidence of war neuroses? Neurotic symptoms amounting to a
-definite clinico-pathological condition are by no means so common as
-is sometimes stated. I do not know of any statistics on the matter,
-but I should be surprised to hear that more than 2 per cent. of the
-Army serving in France are affected in this way. This consideration
-in itself shews that some other factors than war strain must be involved,
-factors relating to the previous disposition of the men affected,
-and the problem is to determine what these are. In the second place,
-as to the dogmatic assertion that Freud’s theory of the psychoneuroses
-cannot apply to those arising under war conditions. An essential feature
-of this theory is that psychoneuroses result from unconscious mental
-conflicts. To ascertain whether these are operative in a given case,
-therefore, it is obviously necessary to employ some method, such as
-psycho-analysis, which gives access to the unconscious. It may, I think,
-be taken as certain that those who deny the action of these conflicts
-in either the war neuroses or in what, by way of contradistinction,
-must be called the peace neuroses, have not thought it necessary to
-use any such method, and they thus place themselves in a position
-very similar to that of a writer who would on <em>a priori</em> grounds deny
-the details or even the existence of histology without ever having
-looked through a microscope, the only avenue to histology. I choose
-this simile because it seems to me that the relation of psycho-analysis
-to clinical psychiatry is not at all inaptly described<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">8</a> as being like
-that of histology to anatomy. Or one might draw an analogy from a
-strictly medical field. If some one were to take a series of cases of
-tuberculosis supervening on measles or typhoid, and then maintain
-that because this ætiological factor was present therefore no microorganism
-could be, so that Koch’s views as to the causation of tuberculosis
-were entirely unfounded, one would surely have the right to
-ask whether any search for the bacillus had been made in the cases in
-question, and to satisfy oneself that the observer had grasped the
-difference between essential and merely exciting causes of disease.
-If the answer to both these inquiries were in the negative, I think
-it will be agreed that no great weight would be attached to the claim
-that Koch’s theory of the nature of tuberculosis had been demolished.
-Yet this is precisely the order of scientific thinking evinced by those
-who maintain that Freud’s theory of the neuroses has been demolished
-by the simple observation that they may manifest themselves under
-the stress of warfare.</p>
-
-<p>I do not mean, however, to assert the contrary of this proposition—namely,
-that the validity of Freud’s theory has been proved in the case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>
-of war neuroses, as I should maintain it has been in the case of peace
-neuroses. I simply hold that the matter is at present <em>sub judice</em>, and
-must remain so until sufficiently extensive investigations shall have
-settled the question one way or the other. It so happens that the
-traumatic neuroses are the field in psychopathology that has hitherto
-been the least explored by psycho-analysis even in peace time, while
-the opportunity of psycho-analytic investigation of the war neuroses
-has, in this country at least, been so meagre that the time is not ripe
-for any generalisation on the subject. Personally I have examined a
-considerable number of cases in the cursory way that is usual in
-hospital work, but I have been able to make an intensive study in
-only some half-dozen cases, and I do not know of any other cases
-that have been investigated by the psycho-analytic method. In spite
-of this paucity of material, a feature inherent in intensive work, the
-critic of psycho-analysis may legitimately demand of the analyst, who
-advances considerable pretensions in regard to understanding the
-pathology of neurotic affections in general, that he should be able
-to formulate some tentative conception of the relation between the
-phenomena commonly observed in the war neuroses and the psycho-analytical
-theory. In the following remarks an attempt will be made
-to meet this demand, although, as has just been explained, there can
-be no question of solving the numerous and as yet unstudied problems
-raised by the observations made in connection with war shock.</p>
-
-<p>It is desirable in the first place to clear away some general misconceptions
-on the subject. The task of assimilating our new experiences
-in connection with the war with any previously held theory of neurotic
-affections has undoubtedly been rendered more difficult by the attitude
-of those workers whose interest in such problems is of contemporary
-origin. They lay much too much emphasis on the newer and perhaps
-more sensational aspects of the phenomena observed, instead of trying
-to correlate the more familiar and better understood ones. This attitude
-has been so pronounced with some writers that one might almost imagine
-that before the war there had never been such calamities as wrecks,
-earthquakes, and railway accidents, and that men had never been tried
-to the limit of their endurance with privation, fatigue, and danger,
-while familiar symptoms like hysterical blindness and paralysis are
-thought worthy of detailed description and are treated almost as novelties
-in psychological medicine. So far as I know, however, although some
-symptoms—e.g., dread of shells—assume a form that is coloured by
-war experiences, no symptom, and hardly any grouping of symptoms,
-occurs in war neuroses that is not to be met with in the neuroses of
-peace, a fact which in itself would suggest that fundamentally very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
-similar agents must be at work to produce the neurosis in both
-cases.</p>
-
-<p>Another very prevalent misconception, one strengthened by the
-official use of that unfortunate catch-word “shell-shock”, is that war
-neuroses constitute a more or less unitary syndrome. It is so often
-forgotten that the term “shell-shock” can only mean, and no doubt
-was originally intended to mean, a certain ætiological factor, and not
-the disease itself. I have preferred to use the less ambiguous and more
-obviously ætiological term “war-shock,” one coined, I think, by Eder<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">9</a>.
-Even when the term “shell-shock” is avoided, its place is usually
-taken by the all-embracing expression “neurasthenia”—in most cases,
-in fact, where there are no physical symptoms of hysteria present.
-True neurasthenia in its strict sense, on the contrary, is a relatively
-rare complaint, certainly in anything like a pure form; I have not
-come across a single case myself in connection with the war. The
-results of war strain are anything but unitary; most of the diverse
-forms of neurosis and psychoneurosis are found to be represented,
-and until these are adequately distinguished one from another it is
-impossible to make any satisfactory study of their individual pathology.
-A further point still more often overlooked, and perhaps even more
-important, is that not only are the results diverse, but the ætiological
-factors concerned in war strain are much more complex than is sometimes
-realised. Careful study of the cases shews that what was the most
-important pathogenetic agent with one patient had nothing to do with
-the neurosis of a second patient, although he may have been equally
-exposed to its influence. For instance, the sight of a near friend being
-killed may have greatly affected one soldier and been closely related
-to his subsequent neurosis, whereas with a second patient who has
-gone through the same experience there may be no connection between
-it and <em>his</em> neurosis; the same applies to the other painful features of
-warfare, the tension of waiting under shell fire, the experience of being
-buried alive, and so on. These considerations indicate the great importance
-of the individual factor predisposing to particular neurotic
-reactions, and point to the necessity for careful dissection of the
-various pathogenetic factors in a number of cases before making
-generalisations as to the way in which the numerous separate influences
-grouped together as war strain may operate.</p>
-
-<p>Coming now to the points of contact between war experience and
-Freud’s theory, one may remark, to begin with, how well the facts of
-the war itself accord with Freud’s view of the human mind as containing
-beneath the surface a body of imperfectly controlled and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
-explosive forces which in their nature conflict with the standards of
-civilisation. Indeed, one may say that war is an official abrogation of
-civilised standards. The manhood of a nation is in war not only allowed,
-but encouraged and ordered to indulge in behaviour of a kind
-that is throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind, to commit deeds
-and witness sights that are profoundly revolting to our æsthetic and
-moral disposition. All sorts of previously forbidden and buried impulses,
-cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater
-activity, and the old intrapsychical conflicts, which, according to Freud,
-are the essential cause of all neurotic disorders, and which had been
-dealt with before by means of “repression” of one side of the conflict,
-are now reinforced, and the person compelled to deal with them
-afresh under totally different circumstances.</p>
-
-<p>It is plain, as MacCurdy has well pointed out<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">10</a>, that men entering
-the Army, and particularly on approaching the battle-field, have to
-undergo a very considerable readjustment of their previous attitudes
-of mind and standards of conduct, a readjustment which is much greater
-in the case of some men than in that of others, and also one which
-some men find it much more easy to accomplish satisfactorily than do
-others. The man’s previous standards of general morality, of cleanliness
-and æsthetic feeling, and of his relation to his fellow-man, have all to
-undergo a very considerable alteration. In all directions he has to do
-things that previously were repugnant to his strongest ideals. These
-ideals are ascribed by some—e.g., Trotter<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">11</a>, and, following him, MacCurdy—to
-the operation of the herd instinct, in other words to the
-influence of the social <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">milieu</em> in which he may happen to have been
-brought up. I think personally that behind this influence there are
-still deeper factors at work of a more individual order, derived essentially
-from hereditary tendencies and the earliest relation of the child
-to its parents. However this may be, it is certain that every one has
-such ideals, though he may not describe them under this name, and
-that in the course of development he insensibly builds up a series of
-standards of which his ego approves—and which I therefore propose
-to refer to by Freud’s term of the “ego ideal”—together with a contrasting
-series of which his ego disapproves.</p>
-
-<p>As every student of genetic psychology knows, this gradual building
-up is never performed smoothly, but always after a number of
-both conscious and unconscious internal conflicts between the conscious
-ego on the one side and various impulses and desires on the other,
-after a series of partial renunciations and compromises. Further, it is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
-exceptional for the whole result to be satisfactory; there always remain
-certain fields—more especially in the realm of sex—where the resolution
-of the conflict is an imperfect one, and it is just from this imperfect
-resolution that, according to Freud, neurotic affections arise. The
-question whether a neurosis will result in a given case is essentially
-a quantitative one. The mind has the capacity of tolerating without
-harm a certain amount of stimulation from these internal impulses
-and desires that are not in unison with the ego, and when this limit
-is passed the energy derived from them flows over into neurotic
-manifestations. The mind has several methods for dealing with the
-energy of the anti-ego impulses successfully—that is to say, without
-the impairment of mental health—and it is only when these methods
-are inadequate to deal with the whole that neurosis ensues. Two of
-these methods may especially be noted. One is the deflection of the
-energy in question from its primitive and forbidden goal to another
-one in harmony with the more social standards of the ego; as every
-schoolmaster knows, sport is an excellent example of this. When the
-primitive goal was a sexual one, this process of deflection, here on
-to a non-sexual goal, has been given the name of “sublimation”, but
-there are similar refining and modifying processes at work in connection
-with all anti-ego impulses—e.g., cruelty. A second method is
-to keep the energy in a state of repression in the unconscious, the
-conscious mind refusing to deal directly with it and guarding itself
-against its influence by erecting a dam or barrier against it, known
-as a reaction-formation. Thus in the case of primitive cruelty, a cruel
-child may develop into a person to whom the very idea of inflicting
-cruelty is alien and abhorrent, the original impulse having been quite
-split off from the ego into the unconscious, and its place taken in
-consciousness by the reaction-formation barrier of horror and sensitiveness
-to pain and suffering. In such ways as these a state of practical
-equilibrium is attained in the normal, the power of the ego-ideal
-having proved sufficient either to utilise for its own purposes (by
-means of modifying) or to keep at bay, the impulses and desires that
-are out of harmony with it. In some people the state of equilibrium
-thus attained is of considerable stability, they have what is popularly
-called a reserve of mental and moral force with which they can meet
-disappointments, difficulties, and emergencies of various kinds in life,
-which means in practice that their capacity for readjustment to radically
-new situations is fairly elastic.</p>
-
-<p>Now, on approaching the field of war the readjustment necessary
-is one of the more difficult ones experienced in life, although it is by
-no means so difficult as can arise in various situations appertaining<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
-to the field of sex. It is an adjustment which practice shews is possible
-to the large majority of men, but there is no doubt that the
-success with which it is carried out is extremely variable in different
-people; and it probably varies in the same person from time to time
-for either internal reasons or for external reasons relating to the
-precise environment at the moment, to the precise war experiences
-through which they may be passing. It is further clear that the readjustment
-is likely to vary in its success almost entirely with the success
-with which the earlier adjustments were made during the development
-of the individual. This statement is meant to carry more than its obvious
-meaning that the more stable a man is the more surely can he
-meet the problems and difficulties of warfare; it has a deeper implication.
-Namely, there is an important relationship between the two
-phases of difficult adjustment, the current one and the older one.
-Fundamentally it is the same difficulty, the same conflict; it is only
-the form that is different. Let us suppose, for instance, that the original
-difficulty in adjustment was over the matter of cruelty, that in
-childhood the conflict between strong tendencies of this kind and
-perhaps specially strong ideals of the contrary sort was an exceptionally
-sharp one, so that it was never very satisfactorily resolved,
-though a working equilibrium may have been established on the basis
-of powerful reaction-formations and various protective devices for
-avoiding in every possible way contact with the subject of cruelty.
-Such a man may well have unusual difficulty in adapting himself to
-the cruel aspects of war, which really means that his long-buried and
-quite unconscious impulses to cruelty, impulses the very possibility
-of whose existence he would repudiate with horror, are stimulated
-afresh by the unavoidable sights and deeds of war. In bayonet practice,
-for instance, the man is taught how best to inflict horrible injuries,
-and he is encouraged to indulge in activities of this order from
-the very thought of which he has all his life been trying to escape.
-He now has to deal afresh with the old internal conflict between the
-two sides of his nature, with the added complication that there has
-to take place an extensive revaluation of his previous standards, and
-in important respects an actual reversal of them. He has to formulate
-new rules of conduct, to adopt new attitudes of mind, and to
-accustom himself to the idea that tendencies of which he had previously
-disapproved with the whole strength of his ego-ideal are now
-permissible and laudatory under certain conditions. One would get a
-very erroneous view of the picture I am trying to draw if one imagined
-that the process of readjustment in question goes on in the
-person’s consciousness. This is never entirely true, and often not at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
-all true; the most important part of the readjustment, and often the
-whole of it, is quite unconscious. We thus see that to obtain a proper
-understanding of the problems of an individual case, and to be able
-to deal with them practically in therapeutics, it is often necessary to
-appreciate the relation between a current conflict and an older one,
-for the real strength and importance of the current one is often due
-to the fact that it has aroused buried and imperfectly controlled
-older ones.</p>
-
-<p>I have taken the one instance of cruelty, but there are many others
-in connection with warfare. It may, indeed, be said in general that the
-process of re-adaptation in regard to war consists of two distinct
-sides: on the one hand, war effects an extensive release of previously
-tabooed tendencies, a release shewn in endless ways—for instance, even
-in the language of camps; and on the other hand the acquiring of a
-strict discipline and self-control along lines widely different from those
-of peace-times. The one is a correlative of the other, and we have
-perhaps in these considerations a psychological explanation of the
-feature of military life that is so puzzling to most civilians—namely,
-the extraordinary punctiliousness that a rigid discipline attaches to
-matters which to the outsider appear so trivial. An indisciplined army
-has always been the bane of commanders, and perhaps the risks
-attaching to indiscipline are related to the release of imperfectly controlled
-impulses that war deliberately effects.</p>
-
-<p>The way in which a relative failure in war adaptation may lead
-to a neurosis can be illustrated by a parallel drawn from the more
-familiar problems of peace neuroses. Imagine a young woman who
-has never been able to reconcile the sexual sides of her nature with
-her ego ideal, and whose only way of dealing with that aspect of life
-has been to keep it at as great a distance from her consciousness as
-possible. If now she gets married, it may happen that she will find it
-impossible to effect the necessary reconciliation, and that, being deprived
-of the <em>modus vivendi</em>—namely, the keeping sexuality at a distance—which
-previously made it possible to maintain a mental equilibrium,
-she develops a neurosis in which the repressed sexual desires achieve
-a symbolic and disguised expression. Similarly in a war neurosis when
-the old adjustment between the ego-ideal and the repressed impulses
-is taken away, it may prove impossible to establish a fresh one on
-the new conditions, and then the repressed impulses will find expression
-in some form of neurotic symptom.</p>
-
-<p>So far as I can judge, the specific problems characteristic of the
-war neuroses are to be found in connection with two broad groups
-of mental processes. One of these relates to the question of war adapt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>tation
-considered above, the other to that of fear. The latter is hardly
-to be regarded as a sub-group of the former, inasmuch as there is no
-readjustment or transvaluation of values concerned, as there typically
-is with the former. The moral attitude towards fear, and the conflicts
-arising in connection with it, remain the same in war as in peace.
-In both cases it is considered a moral weakness to display or be influenced
-by fear, and especially to give in to it at the cost of not doing
-one’s duty. The soldier who would like to escape from shell fire is,
-so far as moral values are concerned, in the same position as a man
-in peace-time who will not venture his life to save a drowning child.
-Indeed, the conflict cannot be as sharp in the case of the soldier, for
-he would find very widespread and thorough sympathy for his quite
-comprehensible desire, and there would be much less social blame or
-guilt attaching to him than to the man in the other situation mentioned.
-So that the problem of fear, which we all agree plays a central
-part in connection with the typical war neuroses, seems to be apart
-from that of war adaptation in general as expounded above.</p>
-
-<p>Before discussing the problem of fear, however, I should like at
-this point to review the position and see how far we have got in the
-attempt to approximate the facts of war neuroses to the psycho-analytical
-theory. This theory of the neuroses is a very elaborate one,
-including many problems of unconscious mechanisms, distinctions
-between the predispositions and mechanisms characteristic of the
-different neuroses, and so on, but it is possible to formulate the main
-principles of it along fairly simple lines, and I now propose to do this
-in a series of statements.</p>
-
-<p>(1) The first principle in Freud’s theory of neurotic symptoms is
-that they are of volitional origin. This principle, long suspected by
-both the medical and the lay public, and the real reason why in the
-past they have been so confounded with malingering, would be at once
-evident were it not for the fact that it is not true of volition in the
-ordinary sense of conscious deliberate voluntary purpose. In other
-words, it is not true of the will as a whole, but only of a part of
-it—namely, a part that the patient is not aware of. Thus, neuroses
-are not diseases or accidents that happen to a person, as the
-French school of psychopathology maintains, but are phenomena
-produced and brought about by some tendency in the person’s
-mind, and for specific purposes. Freud distinguishes three classes
-of motives that operate in this way, one essential, the other two
-not. The indispensable one is an unconscious desire to obtain
-pleasure by gratifying in the imagination some repressed and dissociated
-impulse, a motive, therefore, arising in the part of the mind that is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>
-in harmony with the ego-ideal. A second motive is to achieve some end
-in the outer world; for instance sympathy from an unkind husband,
-which the person finds easier to do by means of a neurosis than in
-other ways. The third set of motives has the same purpose as the
-last, but may be distinguished from it in that they concern the making
-use of an already existing neurosis rather than the helping to bring
-one about. Both the latter sets are usually, but not always, unconscious:
-more strictly, they are preconscious—that is, they do not relate to deeply
-buried tendencies, and so are correspondingly easy to reveal; Freud
-terms them the primary and secondary “gain of illness” respectively.
-Now I take it that this principle of volitional origin is no longer very
-widely questioned by modern psychopathologists, and in the case of
-war neuroses the main motives are visible and comprehensible enough—namely,
-the desire to find some good reason for escaping from the
-horrors of warfare.</p>
-
-<p>(2) The second principle is that all neurotic symptoms are the
-product of an intrapsychical conflict which the person has failed satisfactorily
-to resolve, and that they constitute a compromise formation
-between the two conflicting forces. Here, again, I think that those who
-have been investigating the psychology of war neuroses will agree
-with this principle. MacCurdy,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">12</a> in particular, has described in great
-detail the conflict that arises in soldiers between, on the one hand,
-the motives actuating to continuance at duty and concealment of growing
-sense of incapacity and apprehension, and, on the other, the awful
-sense of failure accompanying the sometimes almost overwhelming desire
-to escape from the horrors of their position. The neurosis offers a way
-out of this dilemma, the only way that the particular person is able
-to find, and the actual symptoms, which are often grossly incapacitating,
-such as blindness, represent the fulfilment of the desire against which
-the man has been fighting. We reach, therefore, the wish-fulfilment part
-of Freud’s theory.</p>
-
-<p>(3) The third principle is that the operative wish that leads to
-the creation of the neurosis is an unconscious one. Freud means this
-in the full sense of the word, and in this sense the principle has not
-yet been confirmed from the experience of the war neuroses. There
-are, however, different degrees of unconsciousness of a mental process,
-and the important point to Freud is not so much the degree of the
-unawareness in itself—this being largely an index of the repression—as
-the repression or dissociation that has led to the unawareness.
-What he maintains is that the wish producing the neurosis is one
-that is not in harmony with the ego-ideal, and which is therefore<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
-kept at as great a distance as possible from it. Anyone who has read
-the touching accounts given by MacCurdy or Rivers<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">13</a> of the shame
-that soldiers feel at their increasing sense of fear, and the efforts
-they make to fight against it, to conceal it from others, and if possible
-from themselves, will recognise that the wish in question is one alien
-to the ego-ideal and is well on in the first stages of repression, even
-if it is half-avowed.</p>
-
-<p>(4) The fourth principle is that current repressed wishes cannot
-directly produce a neurosis, but do so only by reviving and reinforcing
-the wishes that have been repressed in older unresolved
-conflicts. According to Freud, a pathogenetic disappointment or
-difficulty in readjustment leads first to an introversion or turning
-inwards of feeling, and the wish that has been baulked seeks some
-other mode of gratification. It tends to regress back to an older
-period of life, and thus to become associated with similarly baulked
-and repressed wishes belonging to older conflicts. It is the combination
-of these two, the present and the old, that is the characteristic mark
-of the pathogenesis of neurotic disorders as distinct from other modes
-of reaction to the difficulties of life.</p>
-
-<p>Freud considers that there are probably always three factors in
-the causation of any neurosis: a specific hereditary predisposition,
-secondly an unresolved infantile conflict which means that the person
-has not satisfactorily developed past a given stage of individual
-evolution—in other words, that he has been subjected to what is
-called an “infantile fixation” at a given point in development, and
-thirdly the current difficulty. There is a reciprocal relationship between
-these three factors, so that if any one is especially pronounced the
-others may be correspondingly less important. For instance, if the
-hereditary factor is very pronounced then a person may become
-neurotic from the quite ordinary experiences of childhood and adult
-life, for he is incapable of dealing adequately with them. In the case
-of war neuroses it is evident that the current factor is of the greatest
-importance, being, indeed, the only one that so far has attracted
-attention. The only traces of infantile factors I have seen noted have
-been the instances where the localisation of hysterical symptoms
-seems to have been determined in part by the site of old injuries,
-and in a general way the many traits of childhood, such as sensitiveness
-to slights, self-centredment, and desire to be guarded, protected,
-and helped, which are sometimes very evident in the cases of war
-neurosis.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span></p>
-
-<p>We thus see that only one half of the psycho-analytical theory
-has so far been confirmed by the observations of war neuroses.
-According to this theory, there are typically two sets of wishes concerned
-in the production of any neurosis. One of these, the “primary
-gain of illness”, a current one, alien to the conscious ego ideal, and
-therefore half repressed and only half conscious—if that—has not
-only been demonstrated by a number of observers, but has been
-shewn to be of tremendous importance, and certainly the effects of
-treatment largely turn on the way in which it is dealt with. The
-other factor, the infantile and altogether repressed and unconscious
-one, which, according to psycho-analysis, is also essential to the production
-of a neurosis, has not been systematically sought for, though
-I have found it in the few cases of which I have been able to make
-a full study. Its presence or absence is a matter of greater theoretical
-importance than might perhaps appear, even though its practical
-importance may often not be great. For my own part I have the
-utmost difficulty in believing that a current wish, however strong
-that is half conscious and sometimes fully conscious can ever in itself
-produce a neurosis, for it contradicts all one’s knowledge concerning
-the nature of neuroses, as well as my experience, such as it is, of
-war neuroses themselves. I would therefore urge that no conclusion
-is possible on the matter one way or the other until adequate investigations
-have been carried out. That it has its practical side also will
-be pointed out when we come to consider the chronic cases where
-war neuroses pass over into peace ones.</p>
-
-<p>(5) The principle of the psycho-analytical theory that has aroused
-the strongest opposition is that the primary repressed wish ultimately
-responsible for the neurosis is always of a sexual nature, so that the
-conflict is between the two groups of instincts that go to make up
-the whole personality, those concerned respectively with preservation
-of the self and of the species. Dr. MacCurdy has suggested to me
-that this is so only because, apart from war, there is no instinct that
-comes into such strong conflict with the ego-ideal as does the sexual
-one, but that in war the conflict between the instinct for self-preservation
-and the ego-ideal is enough to lead to a neurosis. This may
-seem very plausible, but I shall be surprised if it is confirmed by
-future research. That a neurosis, which after all is a disorder of the
-unconscious imagination, should arise from a conflict between two
-states of mind that are fully in contact with reality would be something
-entirely contradictory of our past experience, as would also a
-neurosis arising from a conflict between two tendencies both belonging
-to the ego. I shall venture to put forward an alternative hypothesis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
-presently when discussing the subject of fear, which we have next
-to consider.</p>
-
-<p>Freud states<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">14</a> that from one point of view all psychoneurotic
-symptoms may be regarded as having been constructed in order to prevent
-the development of fear—another point of contact between his theory
-and the observers of war neuroses, who would surely agree that fear
-is the central problem they have to deal with. By fear is here meant
-rather the mental state of dread and apprehension, increasing even
-into terror, and accompanied by well-marked bodily manifestations, a
-state for which psychopathologists have agreed to use the term “morbid
-anxiety” (or, shortly, “anxiety”) in a special technical sense as being
-the nearest equivalent of the German word <em lang="de" xml:lang="de">Angst</em>.</p>
-
-<p>Morbid anxiety is certainly the commonest neurotic symptom, and
-the theory of its pathogenesis has been the occasion of a very great
-deal of investigation,<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">15</a> with, in my opinion, very fruitful results. We
-meet it in the form of a general apprehensiveness of impending danger
-and evil, as the anxiety-neurosis, and also in hysteria in the form both
-of apparently causeless attacks of dread and of innumerable specific
-phobias. In all its forms its most striking feature is the disproportion
-between its intensity and its apparent justification, so that it seems
-at first sight extremely difficult to correlate with the biological view
-of fear as a useful instinct that guards against danger. Practically all
-modern investigations into its pathogenesis agree that it stands
-in the closest relation with unsatisfied and repressed sexuality, and, in
-my judgment, the conclusion that morbid anxiety represents the discharge
-of repressed and unconscious sexual hunger is one of the most securely
-established in the whole of psychopathology; it is impossible here to
-consider the extensive evidence in support of this conclusion, and I
-can only refer to the published work on the subject<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">16</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The next question is: What is the relation between morbid anxiety
-as seen in peace neuroses and real—<i>i.e</i>., objectively justified—fear, as
-seen in various situations of acute danger and so prominently in the
-war neuroses? The point of connection is the defensive character of
-the reaction. Morbid anxiety, as we are familiar with it in the peace
-neuroses, is a defensive reaction of the ego against the claims of unrecognised
-“sexual hunger” (<em>Libido</em>), which it projects on to the outside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>
-world—e.g., in the form of phobias—and treats as if it were an
-external object; it is, in a word, the ego’s fear of the unconscious.
-But there appears to be an important difference between it and “real”
-dread in that the latter concerns only the ego itself, arises only in connection
-with external danger to the ego, and has nothing to do with
-the desires of repressed sexual hunger. One is tempted to say that
-the latter (real dread) is a normal protective mechanism that has nothing
-to do with the abnormal mechanism of morbid anxiety. Here, however,
-as elsewhere, the line between normality and abnormality is not
-so absolute as might appear, and consideration of the matter leads
-one to examine more closely into the nature of real dread itself. We then
-see that this can be dissected into three components, and that the whole
-reaction is not appropriate and useful as is commonly assumed. The
-reaction to external danger consists normally of a mental state of fear,
-which will be examined further in a moment, and in various activities
-suited to the occasion—flight, concealment, defence by fighting, or even
-sometimes by attacking. On the affective side there is, to begin with,
-a state of anxious preparedness and watchfulness, with its sensorial
-attentiveness and its motor tension. This is clearly a useful mental
-state, but it often goes on further into a condition of developed dread
-or terror which is certainly the very reverse of useful, for it not only
-paralyses whatever action may be suitable, but even inhibits the
-functioning of the mind, so that the person cannot judge or decide
-what he ought best to do were he able to do it. The whole reaction
-of “real” fear is thus seen to consist of two useful components and
-one useless one, and it is just this useless one that most resembles
-in all its phenomena the condition of morbid anxiety. Further, there
-is seen to be a complete lack of relation between development of dread
-and the degree or imminence of danger, nor does it bear any relation
-to the useful defensive activities. Thus, one does not flee because one
-is frightened, but because one perceives danger; in situations of extreme
-danger men very often respond with suitable measures of flight, fight,
-or what not, when they are not in the least degree frightened; on the
-other hand, the neurotic can be extremely frightened when there is
-no external danger whatever. The inference from these considerations
-is that even in situations of real danger a state of developed dread
-is not part of the useful biological mechanism of defence, but is an
-abnormal response akin to the neurotic symptom of morbid anxiety.</p>
-
-<p>In a recent publication<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">17</a> Freud has made the striking suggestion
-that the developed dread sometimes found in situations of real danger
-is derived, not from the repressed sexual hunger that is directed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>wards
-external objects, as is the case with morbid anxiety of the peace
-neuroses, but from the narcissistic part of the sexual hunger that is
-attached to the ego, and I venture to suggest that we may here have
-the key to the states of terror with which we are so familiar in the
-war neuroses. The psycho-analytic investigations of recent years have
-laid increasing stress on the distinction between “object-libido”, the
-sexual impulses that are directed outwards, and the “ego-libido”, the
-narcissistic portion that is directed inwards and constitutes self-love.
-There is good reason to suppose that the latter is the more primary
-of the two, and also the more extensive—though the least explored as
-yet—so that it constitutes, as it were, a well from which externally
-directed sexuality is but on overflow. The analogy naturally occurs to
-one of the protoplasmic outpourings in the pseudopodia of the amœba,
-and the reciprocal relation of these to the main body seems to be
-similar to that between love of others and self-love. It has been known
-for some time that there is a limit on the part of the organism to
-tolerate without suffering more than a given quantity of sexual hunger
-in its familiar sense of impulses directed outwards, and analytic study
-of the psychoses, notably of paraphrenia, has shewn that the same is
-even more profoundly true of the narcissistic sexual hunger. In both
-cases, before other symptoms are formed so as to deal with the energies
-in question and bind them, the first thing that happens is a discharge
-in the form of morbid anxiety, so that we reach the comforting
-conclusion that a normal man would be entirely free from dread
-in the presence of any danger, however imminent, that he would be
-as fearless as Siegfried; it is a gratifying thought that there seem to
-be many such in our Army to-day. It seems to me probable that the
-intolerance of narcissistic sexual hunger which leads to dread in the
-presence of real danger is to be correlated with the inhibition of the
-other manifestations of the fear instinct, with the accumulated tension
-characteristic of the mode of life in the trenches.</p>
-
-<p>I would suggest, therefore, that investigations be undertaken from
-this point of view with cases of war neurosis, especially the anxiety
-cases. Many of the features noted by MacCurdy<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">18</a>, for instance, accord
-well with the picture of wounded self-love: thus, the lack of sociability,
-the sexual impotence and lack of affection for relatives and
-friends, the feeling that their personality has been neglected, or slighted,
-that their importance is not sufficiently recognised, and so on.
-Perhaps a new light may also be thrown in this way on the attitude
-of such patients towards death. I understand that a great part of the
-war neurotic symptoms, and the battle dreams in particular, have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>
-been widely interpreted as symbolising the desire to die so as to escape
-from the horrors of life, an interpretation that does not accord
-well with the equally widespread view that the fundamental cause of
-such neuroses is a fear of death. I greatly doubt, on the contrary,
-whether the fundamental attitude is either a fear of death in the literal
-sense or a desire for death. The conscious mind has difficulty enough
-in encompassing in the imagination the conception of absolute annihilation,
-and there is every reason to think that the unconscious mind
-is totally incapable of such an idea. When the idea of death reaches
-the unconscious mind it is at once interpreted in one of two ways:
-either as a reduction of essential vital activity, of which castration
-is a typical form, or as a state of nirvana in which the ego survives,
-but freed from the disturbances of the outer world.</p>
-
-<p>A word in conclusion as to the therapeutic aspects of psycho-analysis
-in the war neuroses. Even if it were possible, I see no reason
-whatever why a psycho-analysis should be undertaken in the majority
-of the cases, for they can be cured in much shorter ways. But I consider
-that a training in psycho-analysis is of the very highest value
-in treating such cases, from the understanding it gives of such matters
-as the symbolism of symptoms, the mechanisms of internal conflict,
-the nature of the forces at work, and so on, and there is certainly a
-considerable class of cases where psycho-analysis holds out the best,
-and sometimes the only, prospect of relief—namely, in those chronic
-cases where the war neurosis proper has, by association of current
-with older conflicts, passed over into a peace neurosis and become
-consolidated as such.</p>
-
-<hr />
-<h2>FOOTNOTES:</h2>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> I shall only here take into consideration the most important publications out
-of the enormous amount of neurological literature of the war, and only in so far
-as this refers to psycho-analysis. I am indebted to Dr. M. Eitingon and Prof. Dr.
-A. v. Sarbó for access to the necessary authorities.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a> One of Oppenheim’s critics has suggested that these words so difficult to
-pronounce might be used as test words in the examination of paralytic disturbances
-of speech, so that they might at least be of some good.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> These facts have been confirmed in the course of the conference by all taking
-part in the discussions.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">4</span></a> (“<cite lang="de" xml:lang="de">Münchner Mediz. Wochenschrift</cite>”. 1918, No. 42, P. 1150.)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">5</span></a> The hallucinations, which those persons who having had an amputation experience,
-that that part of the body which has been taken away is still there, might
-find an explanation from this source.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">6</span></a> The intention of the medical department of the Prussian War Ministry in regard
-to the organisation of psycho-analytical treatment stations was not carried out in
-consequence of the altered political situation, which took place soon after the Congress.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">7</span></a> Read before the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Psychiatry, April 9, 1918.
-Published in the Proceedings, Vol. XI. Reprinted in “Papers on Psycho-Analysis”:
-Jones, 2nd. Ed. 1918, Ch. XXXIII, p. 564. (Baillière, Tindall &amp; Cox.).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">8</span></a> By Freud, <span lang="de" xml:lang="de">“Allgemeine Neurosenlehre”</span>, 1917, S. 286.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">9</span></a> Eder, “War Shock,” 1917.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">10</span></a> MacCurdy, “War Neuroses”, <cite>Psychiatric Bull.</cite>, July, 1917, pp. 252, 253.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">11</span></a> Trotter, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War”, 1916.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">12</span></a> MacCurdy, <i>op. cit.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">13</span></a> Rivers, “The Repression of War Experience”, <cite>Proceedings of the Royal Society
-of Medicine</cite>, 1918, xi (Sect. of Psych.), p. 1, Dec. 4, 1917.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">14</span></a> Freud, <i>op. cit.</i>, S. 470.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">15</span></a> The latest discussion of the subject will be found in Freud’s “Allgemeine Neurosenlehre,”
-1917, chapter xxv, <span lang="de" xml:lang="de">“Die Angst”</span>. See also his papers in <span lang="de" xml:lang="de">“Sammlung kleiner
-Schriften zur Neurosenlehre,”</span> 1906, chapters v, vi, vii, and a general review of the
-subject in my “Papers on Psycho-Analysis,” 2nd ed., 1918, chapter xxvii, “The Pathology
-of Morbid Anxiety”.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">16</span></a> <i>See</i> also Stekel, “<span lang="de" xml:lang="de">Angstzustände,</span>” 2e. Aufl., 1912.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">17</span></a> Freud, <i>op. cit.</i>, S. 502.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">18</span></a> MacCurdy, <i>op. cit.</i>, pp. 269-272.</p></div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
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