World War II

“During the war there was a brief period of time when psychiatrists related war trauma to actual battle experiences to be relived and abreacted in psychotherapy. However, when the war was over psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists displaced the trauma of individual soldiers onto a drama of a threat to the nation’s masculinity – stirringly embodied in the traumatized, crippled, or mutilated veteran. American psychiatrists displaced this threat in particular on the American mothers. Psychoanalysis rose in unprecedented popularity in American culture after World War II by initially acknowledging and treating war trauma and subsequently repressing and displacing this concern with a grand narrative about the threat mothers posed to the masculinity of the nation” (Pols, 254). . . . “psychiatry immediately jumped on the band-wagon of the reconstruction of American society along the lines of an imagined bucolic past by presenting themselves as those who could provide the guidelines for raising a well-adjusted, strong, and virile post-war generation. Because of these new concerns, psychiatry did not form an exception to the wall of mis-recognition and repression of trauma that faced veterans. . . . After the war, their concern with the predispositions for mental breakdown became dominant again. Psychotherapeutic approaches to repeat and abreact war trauma were replaced by a general concern of a threat to the masculinity of the nation. According to post-war psychiatrists, American mothers (‘smothers’) had raised a generation of weaklings that would inevitably break down in battle” (262). [The problem of why so many Americans had been rejected for service on psychological grounds or broke down during the war was addressed by psychiatrists after the war in terms of] “the seeming lack of virile and tough masculinity in American men, and therefore, in the nation as a whole. And, not surprisingly, the feminized home-front was blamed. . . . Instead of helping a few traumatized soldiers, psychiatrists set themselves the task of aiding the reconstruction of the post-war family: a far more daunting task, keeping its significance as the Cold War increased in strength” (264). . . . With respect to the memories that haunted him [the veteran], psychology and psychiatry provided a compelling modernist discourse by erasing the traumatic pain of the individual as individual, in contrast with the larger historical process in which he participated and to which he traced his trauma [via narrative fetishism]. This erasure of trauma or its repression was first accomplished in discourse – that pain is the responsibility of the individual, and placed right there, detached from any historical, political or social process. Second, the redemptive practice of psychotherapy attempted to repair and remove the psychological damage by functionally erasing it (267). . . . This strategy of replacing the working-through of actual mental wounds caused by past experiences by a mythological scheme of an eternal conflict closely resembles Freud’s abandonment of the seduction hypothesis by putting the Oedipus complex in its place. . . . At the end of the war, history was erased to make room for the eternal and universal structure of the family. . . . In this sense psychoanalysis in America was transformed not in the exploration or recognition of trauma but more in its displacement” (268).