Battle for the mind: World War 1 and the birth of military psychiatry

The Lancet ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 384 (9955) ◽  
pp. 1708-1714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar Jones ◽  
Simon Wessely
Keyword(s):  
World War ◽  
Military Psychiatry ◽  
The Mind

“Imaging the Mind”

2018 ◽  
pp. 9-47
Author(s):  
Noah Tsika
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Psychiatry ◽  
Signal Corps ◽  
Cultural Visibility ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Military ◽  
Industrial State

Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with—but scarcely limited to—documentary film. This chapter looks at some of the subjectivities—some of the “private visions” and “careerist goals”—of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of “documentary endeavors,” including those carried out (often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Sarah Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Social World ◽  
New Method ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. This chapter introduces Mrs. A., Satya Nand, and the outlines of the case, which began with a discussion of bringing “Hindu Socialism” to Indian peasants and turned into an exploration of love, sexuality, ambition, and life after marriage. The case appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in twentieth-century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. This introduction also introduces Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya, central mythic figures who entered Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s science. It asks what it means to begin a conversation about ethics from elsewhere than the usual sources in European myth and philosophy, and wonders at how we might consider this narrative in and beyond its place and time, Punjab on the eve of Partition, considering what it demands of us as readers of and alongside Mrs. A., an anonymous yet intimate voice.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Rebecca Ayako Bennette
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Diagnosis And Treatment ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Psychiatry

This chapter examines an array of files within the context of the time to understand how and why physicians made certain diagnoses and proposed treatments to patients of World War I. It analyses the practices and perceptions that were prominent in the system of military psychiatry during World War I. It also considers the process of diagnosing dissent, which is an endeavor that German physicians focused more on the medical part than on the moral end. This chapter investigates that German wartime psychiatry during World War I concentrated on the diagnosis and treatment of the Kriegszitterer or shell-shocked soldiers. It identifies German soldiers that were presented with a notorious mixture of symptoms that were labelled as hysterics.

The theory of symptom complexes, mind and madness

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio V Daker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Clinical Manifestations ◽  
World War ◽  
Mental Symptom ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Disease Entities ◽  
The Mind

Kahlbaum’s seminal approach to symptom complexes, as opposed to disease entities, is still relevant. Many psychopathologists have approached mental symptom complexes without prejudging them as necessary physical deficits or diseases, favouring a broader dimensional and anthropological view of mental disorders. Discussions of symptom complexes gained prominence in psychiatry in the early twentieth century – through Hoche – and in the period leading up to World War II – through Carl Schneider. Their works, alongside those of Kraepelin, Bumke, Kehrer, Jaspers and others, are reviewed in relation to the theme of symptom complexes, the mind, and mental disorders. A particular feature of symptom complexes is their relationship to aspects of the normal mind and how this affects clinical manifestations. It is further suggested that symptom complexes might offer a useful bridge between the psychic and the biological in theories of the mind.

Arthur Stewart Eve, 1862-1948

1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (18) ◽  
pp. 396-407
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Graduate Faculty ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Mcgill University ◽  
The Mind ◽  
First World ◽  
Scientific Director

Arthur Stewart Eve, who will be remembered mainly for his pioneer work on radioactivity and his lovable character, was born at Silsoe, Bedfordshire, on 22 November 1862, son of John Richard and Frederica (Somers) Eve and, after an active and varied life spent for the most part in Canada, passed away in retirement at Puttenham, Surrey, on 24 March 1948, in his eighty-sixth year. Scholar, teacher, pioneer with Rutherford, soldier and scientific director in the first World War, Eve later was appointed Head of the Department of Physics in McGill University, Montreal, and Dean of the Graduate Faculty. The fine, well-balanced qualities of the man are well presented in the following quotations from an editorial, ‘In a Great McGill Tradition’, which appeared in the Montreal Gazette at the time of his death : ‘In the best sense, he was a university character. He was provocative but not contentious, kindly but not sentimental, critical but not cruel, humorous but not foolish, shrewd but not harsh. As he moved about the campus walks in his last years at McGill, he was a man whose life had been deepened by the vigorous use of the mind on illimitable problems, and mellowed by zest and common sense which had kept his outlook keen and reasonable.’ ‘Dean Eve’s discoveries in radioactivity and in geophysics received their due and full recognition from the highest learned societies of the world, including the Royal Society of London, on whose Council Dr Eve served in his later years. They were the recognition of the fruits of his “voyaging through strange seas of thought”. ‘But these far voyagings, valuable as they were in their discoveries, never took Dr Eve away from the warmth and colour of ordinary human experience. In the soundness of his humanity he looked for his satisfaction: ‘ “Not in Utopia—subterranean fields,— Of some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where, in the end We find our happiness, or not at all.” ’

scholarly journals A Total War of the Mind: The French Theory of la guerre révolutionnaire, 1954–1958

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P.M. Finch
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
French People ◽  
French Theory ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Second World

French theorists of guerre révolutionnaire conceptualized contemporary conflict in the 1950s as a particular form of total war. Located in the idea of global subversive war which provided intellectual rationalization for the army’s experiences in colonial wars after 1945, the theorists argued that the collapse in the distinction between war and peace rendered war permanent and constant, so that France’s colonial wars were a symptom of a broader conflict necessitating the ideological mobilization of the French people. This article contends that much of the inspiration for these ideas can be found in intellectual developments preceding the Second World War.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack M. Gorman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Psychiatric Illness ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
World War ◽  
Psychiatric Illnesses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Neuroscience Research ◽  
The Mind

After World War II, mental health turned toward psychopharmacology, the use of medications to treat psychiatric illnesses, as its mainstay. The success of medications led some to insist that all mental illness is due to the inheritance of abnormal genes and that life’s experiences play a diminished role. This alienated many who believe that psychotherapy is also an effective way of treating these disorders and led to a mistrust of neuroscience research. Some insisted that neuroscience ignores the human “mind.” In fact, neuroscience research in the past 50 years has clearly shown that adverse life experiences have profound effects on brain function and are involved in every psychiatric illness. By accepting this view of neuroscience, we can also accept the idea that the “mind” is in reality the work of the physical brain.

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