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Psychopathological reactions among refugees, which one has been able to observe especially during the recent world war, assume a middle-position between war-neuroses on the one hand and on the other the mental-hygienic difficulties met by emigrants of earlier times in the new countries to which they came. In common with the war-neuroses are the psychic traumata and the extreme physical exhaustion connected to the flight from the mother country; and the forced adjustment to unknown social relationships and the consequent necessity of finding places in new social groups of varying patterns of behavior associate the refugees with the emigrants.
In those cases in which the experience of the flight is especially traumatic, it seems as though acute dissociations of consciousness, hallucinations, depersonalization, and amnesia assume a central position among the psycho-pathological reactions. The sudden severance from the mother-country, the flight and the pursuit, appear to arouse so much strong anxiety that the sense of reality is temporarily set out of function, and thus there occur false evaluations and lack of orientation in the new surroundings.
These conditions obviously become more difficult when the refugee, immediately after he has come to a foreign country, is forced to find new social contacts, new work, a new place to live, and last but not least, new friends. For most of the refugees, this readjustment meant that they were forced to give up a great deal of the expectations and social ambitions they had had in their mother-country. They had to arrange their affairs under pressing conditions, they were relegated to a lower social position, they had to relinquish much of their influence in social groups (in their professions, at their places of work, in their families), they were looked upon with less respect, and they lost much of their individuality by becoming a number in the grey, anonymous mass of refugees.
I am, therefore, inclined to believe that the situati