Psycho-Analysis and the War NeurosesFreud, Sigmund
History
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis; War neuroses
Sometimes one succeeded in directly stimulating the self-treatment of
the patient in the dream. I recollect a neurotic who suffered from
a severe disturbance of speech and also of walking, the result of a
spastic paralysis of the legs and muscles of the mouth in consequence
of a strong repression of rage. The discharge which took place
under hypnosis was so dangerous to those in the vicinity that I had
prematurely to break off the treatment. However, before waking the
patient I told him to discharge the unreleased part in his dream. I
let him sleep alone with an orderly. In the middle of the night he
sprang up and again lived through an experience of anxiety and rage
accompanied with shouting and raving, and although previously paralysed
he ran down the whole length of the staircase of the hospital.
An especially frequent symptom in the war neuroses—the convulsive
attacks—directly represents, in my opinion, an auto-hypnotic state
appearing in the form of an attack.
Being buried (as the result of an explosion) with its total
obliteration of the conscious ego, naturally the most frequent
originator of the war neuroses, acts most often as the first cause. The
loss of consciousness during the convulsive attack and the subsequent
amnesia is that beneficent not-knowing into which the neurotic person
flies before the memory of that all too horrible situation, or before
the knowledge of some act of his own which he may have to perform as
a result of his affective damming-up, but which nevertheless brings
him into grave danger. I have already in my earlier work alluded to
the fact that the physical form of expression of the convulsion varies
according to its unconscious symbolic meaning. The most frequent form
of the convulsion simply represents a repetition of those defence
movements which the patient made when he was threatened with being
shattered when he was buried. The convulsive attacks always take
place when the ideas regarding those events are subconscious, and the
strongly repressed affects which are bound to them, are associatively
stimulated. A door slammed, a thunder-clap, a distant shot, makes
the patient break down, and his previously unconscious anxiety idea
becomes over-weighted. Terror and dread of death here generally form
the primary basis for the dissociation of the psyche and for the
attack-like mastery of the conscious by the unconscious.
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