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