Psychoanalysis and War

Ms Birkett is to be congratulated on bringing to our attention important issues regarding Psychoanalysis and War (British Journal of Psychotherapy 8(3)). My own feeling like hers is that it would be good to see more psychoanalytic contributions on the effects of militarism (and of the lessening of humanitarianism in our present day society too). There are, however, a number of aspects of her article which require response.

She begins with two criticisms of psychoanalysis (1) that, generally, it should have had more to say on the effects of social changes on the individual psyche and (2) that it has an addiction to infantile fantasy and ignores the impact of current realities. In particular she mentions the realities of persecution, war, migration and the concentration camp and holocaust.

She conveys the impression that psychoanalysts have only recently begun to realise the damage wrought by these disasters but, though there may be a relative paucity of literature, psychoanalysts have been writing about them for many years. Contributions are too numerous to mention but in 1968 a series of papers for a conference on the effects of social disaster was included in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. On the nuclear threat, a six-page bibliography was published in the International Review of Psychoanalysis (1987) which included psychoanalytic papers dating back to 1946.

It is perhaps true as Ms Birkett says that Bettelheim is the only psycho-analyst to have written from his personal concentration camp experience, though in many ways others suffered greatly. It was a by-word after the barbarities of the First World War that ex-servicemen typically maintained a life-long silence on their sufferings. The effect of enduring horrors not shared by others seems to cause this reaction. Anna Freud dealt with her experience of becoming a ‘displaced person’ by offering help to certain of the most vulnerable and impressionable of her host country's displaced persons - babies -