This difference needs special appreciation and explanation. Also other men who have received severe organic injuries show such mental attitudes which must surprise us. For example, I have always found that in the amputation hospitals a strikingly cheerful mood prevails. At the beginning of the war I had my attention drawn to the euphoria of the severely wounded men by a particular occurrence. I had to treat four soldiers in a general hospital, who through the splintering of the same shell had had their eyes severely injured. All four had already had enucleation performed in another hospital. They were in no way depressed but gave themselves up to a careless, serene frame of mind. When they—all at the same time—received their artificial eyes a remarkable scene took place. They jumped, danced, and laughed in boisterous spirits, just like children who work themselves up into a frenzy of joy. Also here there is without doubt a regression to narcissism, it is however of a more partial nature. These patients repress the knowledge that through the mutilation they have experienced a depreciation in a more or less high degree, especially in the eyes of the female sex. What they lose in love from outside they seek to compensate by means of self-love. The damaged part of the body receives for them a significance as an erotogenic zone which did not previously belong to it[5].
All the experiences here communicated speak unanimously in the sense that the war neuroses are not to be understood without taking the sexuality into consideration. This view receives a valuable confirmation by means of the mental disturbances observed in the war, which—like mental troubles in general—very often more easily manifest the latent content of their ideas than the neuroses. The mental disturbances which have broken out in the field, as other observers have confirmed, are associated only in a trifling part with the formation of delusions. However, if there is a delusion then it has even a manifest sexual content. In the cases I have seen the delusions are partly of jealousy, partly of homosexual persecution by comrades. I might mention the paranoid illness of a soldier which broke out when he, after long service in the field, went home on furlough and turned out to be impotent with his wife. A very transparent symbolism and other signs pointed with certainty to the significance of homosexual components as the fundamental cause of the delusion. Another man had the delusion of being, during sleep, infected with syphilis in the hospital by his comrades, the origin of the delusion was here also the result of imperfectly repressed homosexuality.