Psycho-Analysis and the War NeurosesFreud, Sigmund
History
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis; War neuroses
In corroboration of this view I might mention a patient who was in
a stuporose condition, with paralysis of all the limbs, and who was
also almost deaf and dumb. By means of suggestion _en masse_, _i.e_.
when lying down among other patients who were being hypnotised, it at
length became possible to hypnotise him. Even then the patient remained
completely stuporose. Only when his sister succeeded in getting from
him a few words concerning an anxiety dream, and after I had repeated
these words to him during hypnosis did marked excitation take place in
the stuporose man. The unconscious became sensitised and with effective
discharge came the recapitulation of the causative occurrence. The
patient having been forced by some jealous and stronger companions to
drag along some branches of trees was overturned into a mass of mud in
which he threatened to suffocate. The subconscious idea was that his
mouth and ears were filled with mud and his limbs pressed into it.
During hypnosis he cleared away this imaginary mud with all his might.
There are, on the other hand, patients who inversely take over the
impulse for curative discharge from the hypnosis into the dream. A
young lieutenant assisted thus very practically in the reduction of
his pent-up affects. For weeks after being blown up he was mentally
deranged and delirious, and still suffered from states of excitement
being unable to carry out the simplest intellectual processes, such as
counting, reading, etc. After the first hypnosis which brought about
a recapitulation of the most recent occurrences with a corresponding
discharge of affect, there followed an intense fury dream. The patient
wrenched out several iron bars from his bed and battered the wall with
them. In the dream he was striking a canal worker with them whom he
had seen daily from the window of the hospital. The conversation next
morning showed that the canal worker had the features of an orderly who
had wanted to detain him in the field hospital and thus prevent him
going back to the front to avenge his brother. The patient’s brother
had recently been killed whilst serving in the same regiment, and the
lieutenant had been fighting with fury and grief in order to avenge
him when he was blown up. His first delirious attack had been directed
against this particular orderly.
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