For instance, the sight of a near friend being killed may have greatly affected one soldier and been closely related to his subsequent neurosis, whereas with a second patient who has gone through the same experience there may be no connection between it and _his_ neurosis; the same applies to the other painful features of warfare, the tension of waiting under shell fire, the experience of being buried alive, and so on. These considerations indicate the great importance of the individual factor predisposing to particular neurotic reactions, and point to the necessity for careful dissection of the various pathogenetic factors in a number of cases before making generalisations as to the way in which the numerous separate influences grouped together as war strain may operate. Coming now to the points of contact between war experience and Freud’s theory, one may remark, to begin with, how well the facts of the war itself accord with Freud’s view of the human mind as containing beneath the surface a body of imperfectly controlled and explosive forces which in their nature conflict with the standards of civilisation. Indeed, one may say that war is an official abrogation of civilised standards. The manhood of a nation is in war not only allowed, but encouraged and ordered to indulge in behaviour of a kind that is throughout abhorrent to the civilised mind, to commit deeds and witness sights that are profoundly revolting to our æsthetic and moral disposition. All sorts of previously forbidden and buried impulses, cruel, sadistic, murderous and so on, are stirred to greater activity, and the old intrapsychical conflicts, which, according to Freud, are the essential cause of all neurotic disorders, and which had been dealt with before by means of “repression” of one side of the conflict, are now reinforced, and the person compelled to deal with them afresh under totally different circumstances.