Psycho-Analysis and the War NeurosesFreud, Sigmund
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Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis; War neuroses
So far as I can judge, the specific problems characteristic of the war
neuroses are to be found in connection with two broad groups of mental
processes. One of these relates to the question of war adaptation
considered above, the other to that of fear. The latter is hardly to
be regarded as a sub-group of the former, inasmuch as there is no
readjustment or transvaluation of values concerned, as there typically
is with the former. The moral attitude towards fear, and the conflicts
arising in connection with it, remain the same in war as in peace.
In both cases it is considered a moral weakness to display or be
influenced by fear, and especially to give in to it at the cost of
not doing one’s duty. The soldier who would like to escape from shell
fire is, so far as moral values are concerned, in the same position as
a man in peace-time who will not venture his life to save a drowning
child. Indeed, the conflict cannot be as sharp in the case of the
soldier, for he would find very widespread and thorough sympathy for
his quite comprehensible desire, and there would be much less social
blame or guilt attaching to him than to the man in the other situation
mentioned. So that the problem of fear, which we all agree plays a
central part in connection with the typical war neuroses, seems to be
apart from that of war adaptation in general as expounded above.
Before discussing the problem of fear, however, I should like at this
point to review the position and see how far we have got in the attempt
to approximate the facts of war neuroses to the psycho-analytical
theory. This theory of the neuroses is a very elaborate one, including
many problems of unconscious mechanisms, distinctions between the
predispositions and mechanisms characteristic of the different
neuroses, and so on, but it is possible to formulate the main
principles of it along fairly simple lines, and I now propose to do
this in a series of statements.
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