Psycho-Analysis and the War NeurosesFreud, Sigmund
History
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis; War neuroses
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
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