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