In this interesting paper Nolen Gertz offers some reflections based on treatment of soldiers done by early psychoanalysts.
Blood/Lust: Freud and the Trauma of Killing in War
While the First World War proved to be a time of unimaginable loss and tragedy that left humanity forever terrified of its capacity to annihilate, for Freud and his followers this same period was seen as a rather fertile one, as it led psychoanalysis to its greatest expansion and its most profound innovation. Though Freud’s productivity was mostly due to his having received an enforced sabbatical from his patients, for the younger generation it was their treatment of soldiers during the war that made their contributions to the theoretical development of the psychoanalytic corpus possible.
Thus, in September of 1918, just as the central powers were fighting their last desperate battles against the Triple Entente, and the cessation of hostility was finally coming into sight, the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress convened in Budapest so as to allow these disparate practitioners to come together again to share their recent findings with each other. And it was during this reunion that Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel held a symposium to announce—before an audience that included delegations of recent converts to psychoanalysis from the German, Austrian, and Hungarian Army Commands—what they had learned from their war-time investigations.
Though these three doctors were each thrown into different areas of the conflict and had little communication with each other during the war, their reports of their individual analyses of the “war neuroses” were surprisingly similar to each other. These expositions were in fact so alike as to even share the same basic structure, with only slight modifications here and there. First they would point out the failures of neurologists whose attempts to provide a physicalist aetiology could never explain, let alone cure, the soldiers’ symptoms. Then they used case studies to show how psychoanalytic methods succeeded in treating soldiers where other methods could not. And finally they would go to great lengths to argue that the onset of trauma in supposedly non-sexual situations should not lead opponents of psychoanalysis to believe they had at last defeated Freud’s sexual aetiology of the neuroses. This last point was of decided importance—as sexuality could of course be said to be the glue that holds psychoanalysis together—and their arguments to defend it centered around the claims that either the predisposition to trauma or the traumatic event itself could be explained sexually.
To read the full paper visit:
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1340&context=gc_pubs