In conclusion I should like to give a short description of the neurosis of a young civil servant, which despite the brevity of the treatment revealed with classical clearness a modified picture of the nature of the neurotic predisposition and the actual outbreak of the illness.
This illness, when looked at from the outside, seemed to be a complete war neurosis without any kind of “civilian” origin. The patient had been for a long time in the field and constantly in the front line and had been exposed to extraordinary hardships. He had been wounded and only fell ill with his neurosis after being blown up twice. He had a severe impediment in his speech in consequence of an almost complete intention spasm of his lips, combined with states of excitement and rage, and attacks of loss of consciousness. The first conversation showed that all the physical disabilities signified nothing to the patient, on the contrary, he was completely broken down in mind and body through his struggles and friction with his superiors. In the first dream the patient received a letter, which to his unbounded rage his father had already opened, so that the red lining to the envelope hung in shreds. In the hypnosis the patient during the reading aloud of this dream underwent an extraordinary state of excitation, in which he re-experienced his last blowing up with unspeakable anxiety and terror. The red envelope lining was the torn out jaw bone of a dear friend and comrade who had been shattered beside him at that explosion. His relation to his father came out, with anger at the thought that he (the father) did not esteem all the great performances which he had accomplished in the field and communicated to him. The next dream after this hypnosis brought up a scene between the father and son. The father in the robe of the public prosecutor forbade his son, according to the law, to speak with some women imprisoned and kept in an underground dungeon. The son started up in anger and said that he had his own law book which lay by one of those women. He went to get it and wandered through underground passages. He found in several rooms earlier loved women, but not his law book. At last he came into the last room and on the threshold his mother met him in her nightdress.
I do not think I need to add many words to this audience to arrive at the interpretation. The patient fulfilled his “law” when he volunteered for the war, in order to put himself over his father through his manliness and obtain his mother. The symbol of the envelope, which, destined for the son, was unjustly opened by the father, is clear in its significance. It is peculiar and interesting how in this letter, which contained for the patient the secret of his life, is shown in combined representation the uninterrupted connection of the origin and outbreak of the neurosis—from the female genitals to the corpse of the shattered friend, to the memory of the last complete breakdown of the ego through the explosion.
I have come to the end of my remarks, and hope that I have proved that the combined psycho-analytical method gives us to-day a true medical treatment for war neurotics. Those doctors who have devised a system of tortures, such as hunger cures, dark rooms, prohibition of letters, painful electric currents, etc. in order to extort from the patients the abandonment of their neurotic symptoms, unconsciously recognise the Freudian theory by the inversion of its fundamental principles. They make a torture of the treatment in order to force the neurotic “to flee into health”. The doctor schooled in psycho-analysis does not need to hound in the opposite direction his patients who have been driven into illness. He releases him from the fetters of his unconscious mind and thus is in the position to guide the neurotic into health and save him.
III.
WAR SHOCK AND FREUD’S THEORY OF THE NEUROSES[7]
By
Dr. Ernest Jones, London.
A matter that used to hamper the opponents of psycho-analysis to some extent was that there was no alternative theory of the neuroses seriously tenable. It was clearly impossible to explain all neurotic manifestations by the catch-word use of the two terms “heredity” and “suggestion”, for our conceptions of heredity, however important in this connection they may well become in the future when more is known of the subject, are at present too vague to explain any complex psychological phenomena, and the idea of suggestion merely introduces yet another problem without solving any of the old ones.
The experience of neurotic affections engendered by the war, however, has enabled the critics of psycho-analysis to put forward the view that the factors invoked by Freud in explanation of these affections need not be present, and therefore cannot be regarded as essential, in the way maintained by him, whereas, on the other hand, a different set of factors is undeniably present and operative; not only so, but these latter factors are held to be all-sufficing, so that it is not necessary to search for any others in the ætiology of the conditions in question. Some opponents of psycho-analysis, particularly those more concerned with combating an unwelcome theory than with ascertaining truth, have even maintained that the experience of the war has proved all Freud’s views to be utterly untenable and false.