Psycho-Analysis and the War NeurosesFreud, Sigmund
History
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis; War neuroses
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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