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Ferenczi's paper “two types of war neuroses” appeared in the Zeitschrift in 1916-17 (Bd IV. 131) and is reprinted in the second book of his collected papers, Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis (Ferenczi, , ). In the footnotes to that collection, we learn that the paper was presented at a Scientific Congress of Hospital Physicians (Ferenczi, , , p. 124).
He begins by describing his work in an army hospital to which he had been transferred in early February 1916, during the First World War. He begins, modestly, by saying how preliminary his understanding is, based as it is on work over a two-month period, when, nonetheless, he had “200 cases under observation.” I find it telling that he, even if only at the beginning of his understanding, felt the need to write and publish his thoughts on the damage to soldiers in the context of that war. The scale of damage, the unprecedented experience of trench warfare, the long exposures to inaction and powerlessness, and the effects of the machine gun: These factors led to breakdown in unexpected ways and to unexpected degrees in many soldiers (Shepherd, 2000). The term “shell shock” betrays the early ideas that these mental and physical collapses were organically driven.