Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [30]
The initial reports of the strange condition were baffling. Seemingly unhurt men presented a congeries of contradictory symptoms: rapidity of breath and inability to breathe, silence and raving, excessive motion and catatonia, refusal to let go their weapons and refusal to touch their weapons. But always nightmares—in case after case, night terrors that woke and alarmed their comrades-in-arms.
Then came symptoms more peculiar still. Deafness, muteness, and blindness; paralyzed fists and legs. All without apparent organic injury.
The French had a name for these men: simulateurs. The British too: malingerers. In fact the earliest treatment prescribed by the English was the firing squad, cowardice being an offense punishable by death in the British army. German doctors, by contrast, used electricity. The avowed theory behind the Germans’ electrocution therapy was not that it cured, but that at a sufficiently high voltage it made returning to the front a preferable alternative. The German doctors had, however, overlooked a third option, of which quite a few of their patients took advantage: suicide.
Yet even these compelling disincentives failed to stem the tide. The numbers of afflicted men rose to staggering proportions. Eighty thousand soldiers in Great Britain would eventually be diagnosed with the mysterious ailment. Many of these were officers of high character and, from the British viewpoint, of unimpeachable blood and breeding. As a result, the malingering thesis came finally to be doubted.
The first doctors to take the condition seriously announced that exploding missiles were to blame. The concussive detonations set off by the mighty shells of modern warfare were said to produce micro-hemorrhaging in cerebral blood vessels, causing a neurological paralysis or shock in the brain. Thus was coined the term “shell shock.”
The name stuck, but not the diagnosis behind it. Too many shell-shocked men had lived through no bombardment at all. It soon became apparent that psychology was more important to their condition than physiology. It became equally apparent that only one psychiatrist on the planet had advanced a theory of mental illness that could explain their symptoms: Sigmund Freud.
Gradually but in growing numbers, physicians the world over—men who had previously regarded psychoanalysis with the deepest distaste and suspicion—began to acknowledge that the Freudian concept of the unconscious alone made sense of shell shock and its treatment. “Fate would seem to have presented us,” wrote a British physician in 1917, “with an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud’s theory of the unconscious.” The test proved positive.
English, Australian, French, and German doctors reported stunning success treating shell shock victims with psychotherapy. In Britain, military authorities called on Dr. Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s earliest disciples—who was still barred from hospital practice because of his penchant for discussing improprieties with twelve-year-old girls—to treat what was coming to be called “war neurosis.” Germany sent a delegation to an international psychoanalytic congress, begging for assistance in dealing with overcrowded shell shock wards. Freud himself—so long calumniated and ostracized—was asked by the Austrian government to lead an investigation concerning the proper treatment of shell shock. By 1918, there may have been only one man alive who both accepted the truth of psychoanalysis and yet felt that Freudian theory could not explain war neurosis. That man was Sigmund Freud.
He should be in school,” Colette said of her brother a few days later. She was behind the wheel of her truck, guiding it over badly rutted roads. She had no qualms about discussing Luc in the boy’s hearing. “But he is too—uncooperative. The teachers in Paris thought he was deaf. They also thought he couldn’t talk. But he can. I know it.”
In the back of