Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 77
War-related neurotic disturbances were not new territory at the
beginning of the 2nd World War. In the Autumn of 1918, Simmel,
Ferenczi and Abraham reported to the 5th Congress of the
International Psychoanalytic Association in Budapest on the
application of the psychoanalytic method in hospitals. In this context,
the famous Freudian quote also appeared:
“it is very probable, too, that the large-scale application
of our therapy will compel us to alloy the pure gold of
analysis freely with the copper of direct suggestion “.
(Freud, 1919)
But how precisely this, "psychotherapy for the people" looked
at that time, in terms of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, cannot be
precisely described. The war neurosis soon revealed itself as a Trojan
horse, which, on the one hand, attributed the primacy of the psychical
to the somatic in the creation of neuroses, but on the other hand
disproved its exclusive sexual aetiology. Rivers, a mentor of
Rickmans, wrote in 1919:
"The partisans of Freud have been led by experience of
the war-neurosis to see that sex is not the sole factor in
the production of psycho-neurosis, but that conflict
arising out of the activity of other instincts, and
especially that of self-preservation, takes an active if not
the leading role." (Rivers, 1919)
For years, however, the social aspect remained for the
psychoanalytic mainstream mainly a product of the individual drives.
One of the first to decide against this view was Karen Horney, who
wrote in 1936:
"Clinical experiences (…) suggests that neurosis is due
not simply to the quantity of suppression of one or the
other instinctual drives, but rather to difficulties caused
by the conflicting character of the demands which a
culture imposes on its individuals. The differences in
neuroses typical of different cultures may be understood
to be conditioned by the amount and quality of
conflicting demands within the particular culture.”
(Horney, 1936)