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The Challenges of the Great War to Freud’s Psychoanalysis

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100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War

Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture ((PSCC,volume 25))

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Abstract

How did the Great War affect psychoanalysis? The common approach to this question has to do with assessing the extent to which psychoanalysis has influenced the medical and military understanding of the soldiers diagnosed with shell shock after the war, as well as the extent to which that influence further contributed to the new interest in Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain. (Lerner 2003, chapter 6; Roper 2015; Mijolla 2005) If we take a conceptual approach and ask about the impact of the Great War on the theory of psychoanalysis, we find ourselves investigating the more specific question: how did the Great War influence Freud’s psychoanalysis? For no matter how severely Freud has been and still is criticized, all psychoanalytic texts and schools lead back to his writings. When one examines Freud’s writings as a whole, comparing his pre-war work to his post-war writings, one can notice quite a few significant shifts. Perhaps most conspicuous is the shift in the theory of the mind as divided, a shift that is consolidated and articulated in The Ego and the Id (Freud 1923). Prior to the war the main division was “topographical,” postulating more or less metaphorical “places” in the mind: consciousness, pre-consciousness, and the unconscious. After the war, the mind is divided “structurally” into three agencies, each with their own motivational functions: the Id, Ego and Super-Ego. The previous division, or rather the previous conception of the unconscious, was not abandoned. The Id, as well as parts of the Ego and the Super-Ego were said to be unconscious. But the main division of the mind was changed, especially since Freud came to understand that his conception of the unconscious did not lend itself to a unified definition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Klein’s influence on Julia Kristeva, see Sarah Cooper (2004: 378–381); on Felix Guattari, Bignall (2004: 277–279).

  2. 2.

    See for example Matthew Sharpe and Joanne Faulkner Understanding Psychoanalysis, 84 (2014).

  3. 3.

    This book includes a paper by Ernest Jones who, being British, did not participate in the Congress.

  4. 4.

    The notion of incompatibility appears throughout the Studies on Hysteria, see for example Freud, “Miss Lucy R.” In Breuer & Freud (1893–1895: 123).

  5. 5.

    Freud first admitted that he no longer believed his initial seduction theory of objective sexual traumas in a letter to Fliess in September 21, 1897 (Freud 1897: 259–60). In 1905, he claimed: ‘I was at that period unable to distinguish with certainty between falsifications made by hysterics in their memories of childhood and traces of real events.’ (Freud 1906: 274).

  6. 6.

    See for example Freud (1933: 367): ‘[…] the childhood experiences constructed or remembered in analysis are sometimes indisputably false and sometimes equally certainly correct, and in most cases compounded of truth and falsehood.’ He proceeds to stress the importance of psychological reality: ‘It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantasies for himself, and this fact is of scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had really experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.’ (Freud 1933:368)

  7. 7.

    The “ego instincts” are introduced in Freud (1910: 215–16). In that paper, Freud emphasizes the repressive function of the ego instincts, which is a defensive function against unacceptable sexual desires.

  8. 8.

    A clear statement of this theory can be found in Freud (1901: 682). That section was added to this book in 1911.

  9. 9.

    See the further references to aggression in Freud prior to “Mourning and Melancholia” in Schimmel (2014: 133–134); also Strachey (1957: 239–242).

  10. 10.

    This preference reflects Schimmel’s own sceptical views about the death instinct, apparent at the end of his Chapter 7.

  11. 11.

    This insistence was inserted after the war in 1919 to the Interpretation of Dreams, at SE 5: 557.

  12. 12.

    As Freud says: ‘But it is to be noted that only in rare instances can we observe the pure effects of the compulsion to repeat, unsupported by other motives.’ (Freud 1920: 23).

  13. 13.

    Freud never ceased talking about wish-fulfillments after Beyond. Although emphasis shifted to social matters, wish-fulfillment had a role to play in those, eg in religion as described in The Future of an Illusion [1927] and in his accounts of symptom formation, as eg in Freud (1932: 221–222).

  14. 14.

    For a historical survey of the various methods used with the WW1 war neurotics and their success/failure rates, see Linden & Jones (2013: 627–658).

  15. 15.

    These include Ernest Simmel who spoke the Budapest Congress, and also Max Nonne, as mentioned by Ferenczi, at (1921: 10). For an extensive account of the various influences of psychoanalytic methods on mainstream psychiatrists, see Lerner (2003: 165–75).

  16. 16.

    Freud, in the introduction to the Congress Proceedings, also mentions that the traumatic neuroses of peacetime were not recognized to be influenced by sexual factors, at (1921a, b: 3). Ernest Jones notes that the traumatic neuroses of peacetime were actually explored by psychoanalysis, at Jones (1921: 46).

  17. 17.

    The importance of emotions was very clear in the war neurotics, in particular fear and anger, as Simmel says (1921: 34).

  18. 18.

    See Ferenzi’s discussion of Nonne in Ferenczi (1921: 17).

  19. 19.

    In a letter to Simmel, following the Budapest Congress (dated Feb 20, 1918), Freud says: “You take essentially the point of view of Studies on Hysteria.” At Deri & Brunswick (1964: 97).

  20. 20.

    The Introduction was written in Spring 1919 and in September 1919 Freud circulated the complete manuscript among his friends. See Gay (1998: 921).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Matthew Sharpe, Paul Schimmel and especially David Macarthur for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Talia Morag

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  1. Talia Morag
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Correspondence to Talia Morag .

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  1. Philosophy, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Victoria, Australia

    Matthew Sharpe

  2. Faculty of Arts-Education, Waurn Ponds Campus, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Victoria, Australia

    Rory Jeffs

  3. Department Philosophy, Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Jack Reynolds

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Morag, T. (2017). The Challenges of the Great War to Freud’s Psychoanalysis. In: Sharpe, M., Jeffs, R., Reynolds, J. (eds) 100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50361-5_7

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