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