Before discussing the problem of fear, however, I should like at this point to review the position and see how far we have got in the attempt to approximate the facts of war neuroses to the psycho-analytical theory. This theory of the neuroses is a very elaborate one, including many problems of unconscious mechanisms, distinctions between the predispositions and mechanisms characteristic of the different neuroses, and so on, but it is possible to formulate the main principles of it along fairly simple lines, and I now propose to do this in a series of statements.
(1) The first principle in Freud’s theory of neurotic symptoms is that they are of volitional origin. This principle, long suspected by both the medical and the lay public, and the real reason why in the past they have been so confounded with malingering, would be at once evident were it not for the fact that it is not true of volition in the ordinary sense of conscious deliberate voluntary purpose. In other words, it is not true of the will as a whole, but only of a part of it—namely, a part that the patient is not aware of. Thus, neuroses are not diseases or accidents that happen to a person, as the French school of psychopathology maintains, but are phenomena produced and brought about by some tendency in the person’s mind, and for specific purposes. Freud distinguishes three classes of motives that operate in this way, one essential, the other two not. The indispensable one is an unconscious desire to obtain pleasure by gratifying in the imagination some repressed and dissociated impulse, a motive, therefore, arising in the part of the mind that is not in harmony with the ego-ideal. A second motive is to achieve some end in the outer world; for instance sympathy from an unkind husband, which the person finds easier to do by means of a neurosis than in other ways. The third set of motives has the same purpose as the last, but may be distinguished from it in that they concern the making use of an already existing neurosis rather than the helping to bring one about. Both the latter sets are usually, but not always, unconscious: more strictly, they are preconscious—that is, they do not relate to deeply buried tendencies, and so are correspondingly easy to reveal; Freud terms them the primary and secondary “gain of illness” respectively. Now I take it that this principle of volitional origin is no longer very widely questioned by modern psychopathologists, and in the case of war neuroses the main motives are visible and comprehensible enough—namely, the desire to find some good reason for escaping from the horrors of warfare.