Shell Shock

1915

C. S. Myers (1873–1946)

Military efforts to deal with psychological problems caused by warfare have had little success either in understanding their causes or in finding effective treatments. In World War I, for what was variously called “shell shock” or “soldier’s heart,” both sides discounted the large number of psychiatric casualties and offered eugenic explanations—i.e., the men broke down because they were of inferior stock. The war was particularly savage, with millions killed by shelling, poisonous gases, and bombs. Unknown numbers of men were killed by machine-gun fire when they were senselessly ordered to charge enemy lines over muddy, obstacle-filled terrain. After even the first few months of the war, young men in the prime of life began showing up at combat treatment tents with strange symptoms; some reported that they could not see, hear, or speak. Some of the men could not walk normally, or at all. Yet physical examination revealed no neurological damage.

In 1915, the British psychologist C. S. Myers termed these reactions shell shock, and by war’s end more than eighty thousand British soldiers suffered from it. Myers thought that the symptoms might be caused by the concussive impact of exploding shells; however, many of the soldiers developed shell shock without ever going into battle. The symptoms displayed in shell shock resembled the symptoms of Hysteria. Some of the shell-shocked soldiers were court-martialed and shot; some were forced back into battle, where they were unable to function, and many were sent home for hospitalization. In England, the anthropologist-psychologist-physician W. H. R. Rivers was among the first to try Freud’s talk therapy with these victims. To his surprise, the rate of successful treatment was much greater than with any other treatment in use by the military at that time. His successful use of talk therapy prepared the way for the rapid growth of Psychoanalysis in Britain after the war.

SEE ALSO Hysteria (1886), Torres Straits Expedition (1898), Psychoanalysis (1899), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1980)

British Soldiers occupy a German trench at Ovillers-la-Boisselle during the Battle of the Somme, July 1916.