Thoughts Of A Psychiatrist On The War And After (1919) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF WAB- THE phenomena of regression, the failure of sublimation, take on similar characters in the individual and thus also in the group which reflects the conjoined reactions of its individual members. I have already indicated in a general way the nature of some of these reactions, the primitive ones of hate, cruelty, and deceit. In the individuals these tendencies manifest themselves in killing, looting, burning, rape, and all manner of bloodshed and violence, such as bring about the general feeling of the collapse of civilization. Some of these reactions show with especial clearTHOUGHTS OF A PSYCHIATRIST ness the regressive tendencies. It is the sex instinct, for example, which, in the course of cultural development, is most subjected to repression and suffers infinite distortions in its efforts to find expression and free itself from the fetters of innumerable taboos. Quite characteristically, therefore, do we find that acts of sexual violence and lawlessness characterize the conduct of the unrestrained soldiery. The sex instinct in its manifold manifestations which under repression produces in times of peace, for the most part, neuroses which are crippling to the individual only, in times of war leads to overt acts of concrete indulgence often at the expense of the lives of others. Loosed from the usual bonds of convention and social restraint it tends to outcrop in veritable orgies of lust. It is quite similar with other socially repressed tendencies. Hate manifests itself in wanton destruction, an infantile type of reaction, that reminds us of the angered child that breaks up its toys and tears up its books. Some of these hate reactions show peculiarly their infantile sources, such as the defilement of temporary quarters in captu...