The ‘War of Nerves’

The ‘war of nerves’ is nothing new as a fact of human experience; what is new is that its existence has been recognized under an almost medical title. The subject is too vast and too theoretical for a book which is intended to be of immediate use, and this chapter will therefore be limited to the consideration of a few points that may be helpful in understanding practical suggestions made later. If the style is dogmatic, this may be taken as a symptom of the need for compression and not as a claim to omniscience.

The ‘war of nerves’ is an attack directed at the individual personally; if he can dissociate himself from the mass movement of a nation at war he may escape some of the effects. But then, from the point of view of an enemy, he has become a casualty. Or he can remain a member of his society; in which case, the more emotionally bound the members are, the more strongly will he feel that the attack is being launched at himself. Only if he remains at once both a member of his community and yet unaffected by the enemy's attack, in the way that the enemy wishes him to be, can he be said to remain psychologically not a casualty.

Perhaps it may not seem too late now to ask what the object of this type of warfare is. We suggest that the object of the combatant is to exploit unconscious phantasies1 both in the enemy and in himself, in such a way that the enemy is discomfited and he himself benefited.

In short, it might be described as the opposite of a psychotherapeutic procedure in which a knowledge of the unconscious on the

part of one participant is used for the benefit of the other. More precisely, one of the aims of such an attack would appear to be to force an opponent to be distracted from reality dangers by fear and guilt arising from phantasies in his own mind. As this fear is con