The Invisible Wound: Shell Shock and Psychoanalysis

• Published in: Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination pp. 17 - 56
• Main Author: Bonikowski, Wyatt
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2013
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: death drive; Shell Blast; Young Man; Transference Neuroses; War Neuroses; Freud's Case Histories; War Office Committee; Repetitive Resistances; British military doctors; Shell Shock; psychological effects; psychoanalysis; Morbid Process; Primary Masochism; Primal Scene; Home Town; Wartime Context; Wolf Man; Dead Man; Shellshocked Soldier; Elementary Traumatic Neurosis; Animal Kingdom; First World War; etiological factors; Functional Nervous Disorders
• ISBN: 9781409444176; 1409444171; 9781138273108; 1138273104
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315608921-2

By 1916 the English press had already begun constructing a mythology of the psychological effects of the First World War. The British military doctors were both appropriating psychoanalysis and questioning its fundamental theories, Freud was also modifying one of his most basic premises, specifically the nature of the subject's relation to pleasure and pain. For both psychoanalysis and British military medicine, shell shock presented a challenge to contemporary ways of thinking about the psyche and its relation to external events, necessitating a reevaluation of earlier theories and the opening up of new directions of thought. In the history of psychoanalysis, the war neuroses have a provisional status as a category of neurosis defined more by the wartime context than by any clear etiological factors. If the concept of the death drive suggests that the origin of neurosis, of self, of life and death is divided, then an understanding of psychoanalysis as a search for origins must be modified. By 1916 the English press had already begun constructing a mythology of the psychological effects of the First World War. The British military doctors were both appropriating psychoanalysis and questioning its fundamental theories, Freud was also modifying one of his most basic premises, specifically the nature of the subject's relation to pleasure and pain. For both psychoanalysis and British military medicine, shell shock presented a challenge to contemporary ways of thinking about the psyche and its relation to external events, necessitating a reevaluation of earlier theories and the opening up of new directions of thought. In the history of psychoanalysis, the war neuroses have a provisional status as a category of neurosis defined more by the wartime context than by any clear etiological factors. If the concept of the death drive suggests that the origin of neurosis, of self, of life and death is divided, then an understanding of psychoanalysis as a search for origins must be modified.