Freud on the First World War, Part 1 (2019)
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| Communication Trench, Battle of Somme, 1916 Photo: Royal Engineers, No 1 Printing Company |
Freud on the First World War (Part 1)
Jasna Koteska, Full Professor in Humanities, Faculty of Philology "Blaze Koneski", Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia.
The full text here.
How to cite: Koteska, Jasna (2019). "Freud on the First World War (Part 1)". Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences. 4 (2), 53-68.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.4.4
FREUD ON THE FIRST WORLD WAR
(Part 1)
Jasna Koteska
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje
I.
The Birth of Psychoanalysis as an Austro-Hungarian Legacy
Despite its many shortcomings, from the
regressive political system of governance to the refusal to recognize the basic
human freedoms and political participation, the Austro-Hungarian Empire
(1867–1918) left several important international
legacies behind: the nineteenth century idea of cosmopolitanism, the
mixture of ethnicities and cultures, innovations in the arts and sciences, the
promotion of new ideas, the entrepreneurial spirit, the encouragement of
equality for Jews at a time of rising anti-Semitism across Europe, etc. And
among them, one important legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is the birth of psychoanalysis.
Born between 1895 and 1900, psychoanalysis
provided a radical insight into human nature, explaining that humans are torn
between two paradoxical calls: a) The will for total (self-) annihilation, and
for the brutal destruction of everything which exists (the Thanatos principle);
b) At the same time, this destructive impulse is never fully realizable,
because it constantly gets blocked by the human urge to stick to what
psychoanalysis calls ‘a partial, lost object’, which could translate to desire for objects (the Eros principle).
The search for the ‘lost object’ is not performed out of a belief that there
exists such a ‘lost object’, nor that it will satisfy the actual needs of people. Instead, the ‘lost
object’ serves as a reminder that there exists a ‘primordial lack’ in humans.
Humans are not capable of bypassing the radical antagonism between the finite
and the infinite. Due to the radical chasm, people endlessly repeat their
obsession with their ‘lost objects’, creating what psychoanalysis recognized as
the ‘surplus excess of life’, and humans are beings explained by their excessive nature. Psychoanalysis
explains that humans are torn between two contradictory principles: the
pleasure principle and the reality principle, between Eros and Thanatos. For
Freud, Thanatos is the primary drive,
and it is more fundamental than the Eros.
Freud’s explanation of Thanatos as the more fundamental drive strangely overlapped with the devastating outcomes of the First World War. The last European experience of war dated back to 1870 and most parties expected the Great War of 1914 to be a brief conflict, but the war lasted for four years, and it took the lives of 20 million and wounded many more. It was the first war fought with the industrial means of modern warfare, and it set new standards for destructiveness and for the ‘passionate surplus of life’. Although Freud’s discipline was originally intended to treat individuals, it soon became useful in explaining the attitudes of collective entities, and offered multiple insights into human capacities for destruction, aggression and brutality. Freud wrote that contrary to common knowledge, humans are not more reflexive than animals. What ‘humanizes’ people is never just what moral norms preach. People appear more ‘human’ than animals mainly because they are inherently caught up into the closed loop of repetition of the same gestures and rituals, much of them connected to destruction or self-destruction. Two years after the end of World War I, in his study Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud writes:
If we are to take it as truth that knows no exception that everything
living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall
be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards,
that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.
Freud often explained the emergence of life from
the inorganic as error, or divergence. Although the drive to return to
inorganic is inoperative, in a state of inactivity, for Freud death is the
fundament of life. The function of the endless search for the ‘lost object’,
for the excessive pleasure, (the
Slovenian psychoanalyst, Slavoj Žižek, interpreting the two principles, writes:
‘The human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are
possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess’[ii]), Freud
explained by two needs: the need for people to be bound together into groups
and to enforce the moral group norms, but also by the need to ‘forget’ the
chasm between the finite and the infinite. The function of the pleasure
principle is to negate, to nullify the obviousness of death as the fundament of
life.
ABSTRACT
The article “Freud on the First World War (Part 1)” analyzes the birth of psychoanalysis as Austro-Hungarian legacy, and the role of the Austrian psychoanalytic Sigmund Freud in the events of the First World War (1914-1918). The article explains how psychoanalysts modified their doctrine in relation to the historical events, because the beginning of the World War 1 overlapped with Freud’s writings about the Thanatos as a more fundamental drive than Eros. The article argues that contrary to popular belief that the Great War obstructed the rise of psychoanalysis, the evidence proves that World War I was the single most important historical event for the triumph of psychoanalysis. Originally intended to treat individuals, psychoanalysis proved to be useful for explaining the attitudes of collective entities and Freud and his pupils further developed the concepts of war neurosis, shell shock, and the so-called “theory of the stimulus shield”. The article analyzes the attitude of psychoanalysis towards the war torture (especially in the so-called “The Rat Man case”), and the struggles of Freud and his pupils to adapt and rethink the methods for treatment of traumatized soldiers.
KEY WORDS
Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis. First World War.
Trauma. The Rat Man case. Torture. Fast and slow cure. Shell shock. Neurosis.
FROM THE JOURNAL'S REVIEW
The
author of the article often goes against established stereotypes. As an
example: the author shows that the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not interfere
but in many respects contributed to the establishment of Freud as a scientist.
The second important factor in the development of psychoanalysis, as the author
convincingly shows, is the First World War. Finally, the third factor that
determined the features of the Freudian concept is the prevalence of Thanatos
over Eros.
The
article is interdisciplinary in nature (analysis of the history of military
psychiatry ¾ the history of the terms neurosis, Shell shock,
torture in the trenches, faradization, quick and slow cure, plus philosophical
and ethical thoughts of the author).
The
article is analytical; the author’s thoughts are deep and original. The
materials attracted by the author are little-known (for example, the
conversation between Freud and Rilke, where existential motives are manifested).
With good reason the title of this manuscript could be “Unknown Freud”.
The
manuscript deserves the highest praise.
NOTES:
[i]
Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, The Standard Edition, Translated by James Strachey, with a
biogaphical introduction by Peter Gay, W. W. Norton & Company, New York,
1961, 46.
[ii] Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
2006, 62.
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