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Science is often rewritten these days as the endless replay of knowledge driven by power. Anthropologist Allan Young's book is no exception. Its title is taken from an earlier researcher's account of ‘the harmony of illusions’ which results when scientists force their data to conform with their ‘personal will’. Young does much the same for the history of post-traumatic stress (PTSD).
He begins with the forced biological connection made by British surgeon John Erichsen in his 1866 account of ‘nervous shock’ following railway accidents, a diagnosis impelled by victims' claims for compensation. Young then recounts the forces leading to the World War I diagnosis of ‘shell shock’. He dwells particularly on W.H.R. Rivers's work. Like others, Rivers tended to diagnose shell shock in men from the ranks as due to congenital or acquired weakness of the will, but in officers as due to excessive will-power and emotional repression inculcated by their public school training ‘to meet without manifestation of fear any occasion likely to call forth this emotion’ (p. 65). Rivers accordingly urged that, in treating officers, doctors should pit their will against that of the patient:
We should lead the patient resolutely to face the situation provided by his painful experience.
We should point out to him that such experience… can never be thrust wholly out of his life …
His experience should be talked over in all its bearings. (Rivers, quoted by Young, p. 67)
Just as Yealland, as recounted by Pat Barker in her novel Regeneration, used electric shock to force his patients to talk, Rivers, says Young, used suggestion to the same end.
Young similarly attributes the ‘invention’ of PTSD to a power struggle, specifically to pressure from those concerned about the welfare of returned soldiers from Vietnam