I have come to the end of my remarks, and hope that I have proved that the combined psycho-analytical method gives us to-day a true medical treatment for war neurotics. Those doctors who have devised a system of tortures, such as hunger cures, dark rooms, prohibition of letters, painful electric currents, etc. in order to extort from the patients the abandonment of their neurotic symptoms, unconsciously recognise the Freudian theory by the inversion of its fundamental principles. They make a torture of the treatment in order to force the neurotic “to flee into health”. The doctor schooled in psycho-analysis does not need to hound in the opposite direction his patients who have been driven into illness. He releases him from the fetters of his unconscious mind and thus is in the position to guide the neurotic into health and save him.
WAR SHOCK AND FREUD’S THEORY OF THE NEUROSES[7]
A matter that used to hamper the opponents of psycho-analysis to some extent was that there was no alternative theory of the neuroses seriously tenable. It was clearly impossible to explain all neurotic manifestations by the catch-word use of the two terms “heredity” and “suggestion”, for our conceptions of heredity, however important in this connection they may well become in the future when more is known of the subject, are at present too vague to explain any complex psychological phenomena, and the idea of suggestion merely introduces yet another problem without solving any of the old ones.
The experience of neurotic affections engendered by the war, however, has enabled the critics of psycho-analysis to put forward the view that the factors invoked by Freud in explanation of these affections need not be present, and therefore cannot be regarded as essential, in the way maintained by him, whereas, on the other hand, a different set of factors is undeniably present and operative; not only so, but these latter factors are held to be all-sufficing, so that it is not necessary to search for any others in the ætiology of the conditions in question. Some opponents of psycho-analysis, particularly those more concerned with combating an unwelcome theory than with ascertaining truth, have even maintained that the experience of the war has proved _all_ Freud’s views to be utterly untenable and false.