The Traumatic Neuroses Of War

"The material of this book was the subject of a paper originally published in the Psychoanalytic quarterly (vol. i, nos. 3-4), under the title, 'The bioanalysis of the epileptic reaction' ... The book ... is appearing in another edition in the Psychosomatic medicine monographic series."--Foreword.

"The material of this book was the subject of a paper originally published in the Psychoanalytic quarterly (vol. i, nos. 3-4), under the title, 'The bioanalysis of the epileptic reaction' ... The book ... is appearing in another edition in the Psychosomatic medicine monographic series."--Foreword.

The nosological roots of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be traced back to th~American Psychiatric Association's DSM-I entry of gross stress reaction, as published in 1952. Yet the origins of the current enthusi asm with regard to post-traumatic stress can be traced back to 1980, which marked the emergence of the term post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM III. This reflected the American Psychiatric Association's acknowledgment of post-traumatic stress as a discrete, phenomenologically unique, and reli able psychopathological entity at a time in American history when such recognition had important social, political, and psychiatric implications. Clearly, prior to DSM-I the lack of a generally accepted terminology did little to augment the disabling effects that psychological traumatization could engender. Nor did the subsequent provision of an official diagnostic label alone render substantial ameliorative qualities. Nevertheless, the post Vietnam DSM-III recognition of PTSD did herald a dramatic increase in research and clinical discovery. The American Red Cross acknowledged the need to establish disaster mental health services, the American Psychological Association urged its members to form disaster mental health networks, and the Veterans Administration established a national study center for PTSD.

To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

This transnational, interdisciplinary study of traumatic neurosis moves beyond the existing histories of medical theory, welfare, and symptomatology. The essays explore the personal traumas of soldiers and civilians in the wake of the First World War; they also discuss how memory and representations of trauma are transmitted between patients, doctors and families across generations. The book argues that so far the traumatic effects of the war have been substantially underestimated. Trauma was shaped by gender, politics, and personality. To uncover the varied forms of trauma ignored by medical and political authorities, this volume draws on diverse sources, such as family archives and narratives by children of traumatized men, documents from film and photography, memoirs by soldiers and civilians. This innovative study challenges us to re-examine our approach to the complex psychological effects of the First World War.

This is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century. Both absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it weaves literary, medical, and military lore to give us a fascinating history of war neuroses and their treatment, from the World Wars through Vietnam and up to the Gulf War.

As Anthony Babington is careful to point out in his forwrd, this is not a medical book. It is, rather, a distillation, in words which any layman can understand, of the long struggle by the medical profession, and by influencail civilians of an understanding frame of mind, to persudae the Service Chiefs, in particuliar Senior army pfficers, that soldiers can only stand so much fighting. In the First World War, as Babington points out, men were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion. One can only wonder that many more didn't crack up under the appalling stress to which they were subjected. By 1939 the situation had improved, and of course the Second World War was a much more mobile affair, without the set-piece mass slaughter that characterised the earlier conflict. It may also be remarked that it was much easier for the average private soldier to realize that he was fighting for a good cause, the Nazis being more readily identifiable as bogeymen than the soldiers of the Kaiser. There are those who argue that in the postwar era, things have gone too far in the opposite direction. Indeed Babington quotes the Duke of Edinburgh as saying: "We didn't have counsellers rushing around every time someone let off a gun asking "Are you alright" You just got on with it." Nonetheless few would argue that a counsellor is preferable to a firing squad. Judge Babington has produced a fascinating, if sometimes harrowing, study of the effects of war upon the fighting soldier, of the gradual understanding of the problem of battle fatigue and of the more merciful and sympathetic approach to its treatment. Readers of his earlier works will appreciate that it is a subject which he is uniquely qualified to handle.