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The paper shows how psychiatric knowledge and procedures had been used during the First Word War. As part of the war machine, psychiatry had special functions in the mobilization of the masses as well as in the treating and rehabilitation of those people who suffered serious psychological disturbances related to war events – first of all, soldiers who experienced “shell shocks”, and developed afterwards mental and bodily symptoms of what was called then “traumatic neurosis” or “war neurosis” (in more recent psychiatric terminology, “posttraumatic stress disorder” – PTSD). The main task of psychiatrists was to cure these soldiers as quickly and as effectively as possible – in order to send them back directly to the same battlefield situations, where they already had to face deadly dangers before their treatments. For the majority of army doctors and psychiatrists, war neurotics were either simply “hysterics” or “malingerers” who intentionally used their pretended symptoms in order to refuge from front service and to gain some benefits or pensions; or they suffered in some sort of hereditary, degenerative disease which caused their inability to cope with stress, lack of physical and psychological strength, will, bravery, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. In both cases, however, war neurosis was regarded as a kind of character deficiency, or a sign of a “feminine” character. In treating war neurotics, electric therapy, the application of repeated, painfully high tension of faradic current shocks was widely used, together with other, quite brutal methods which were in fact more punitive then therapeutic. In the paper I will show how these methods had been justified by most psychiatrists with nationalist and chauvinistic rhetoric, arguing that psychiatry should serve the welfare of the nation rather then the individual. For example, a German psychiatrist called hysteria as “psychopathia gallica”. In the paper I am focusing on the treatment and the overall understanding of war neurosis in the Austro-Hungarian and the German military, with an outlook at the British and French practices. Emerging psychoanalysis, which already developed its own conception of hysteria, neurosis and trauma, also entered to the scene, since several psychoanalysts served as army doctors during the first World War. The psychoanalytic conception of war neurosis, developed by Sándor Ferenczi in Hungary, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel in Germany, seemed to be a humanizing alternative to the dominant, mainly “punishing” procedures applied by mainstream military psychiatrists of the epoch – that is, the “normalization” of the soldiers, which meant to rehabilitate their readiness to fight again. The psychoanalytic approach elaborated by psychoanalysts to war neurosis anticipated later debates on the nature of individual and collective psychic traumata. Nevertheless, most psychoanalysts of this Művelődés-, Tudományés Orvostörténeti Folyóirat 2014. Vol.5.No.8. Journal of History of Culture, Science and Medicine ISSN/EISSN: 20622597 DOI: 10.17107/KH.2014.8.33-58 www.kaleidoscopehistory.hu Prof. emer. Erős Ferenc DSc. 34 period, though avoided nationalist rhetoric, did not question the political and military goals of the war itself; their main aim was to ensure the re-accommodation of soldiers to the fights – with different, not necessary more effective, but with certainly more humane methods. As I will also show, most psychoanalysts did not question the stigmatizing character of “war neurosis” as psychiatric diagnosis.

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