Psychotherapy and War Experience

Abstract

INABILITY to see the wood for the trees is not uncommon in writers on most scientific subjects, but the characteristic of many medical exponents of psychotherapy seems rather that to them the wood is invisible because of their proximity to one very large and important tree. Dr. William A. Brend, who con tributes a notable article entitled “Psychotherapy and War Experience” to the January issue of the Edinburgh Review, is emphatically not one of these. His essay attracts one, apart from the obvious interest and importance of its subject, on account of the balance, the perspective, the background, and the sympathetic appreciation of delicate nuances which the picture displays. It is a lucid and judicious account of the substance of eight publications—not all of them recent—by Freud, Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Lay, and McCurdy; but it is much more than this, for it gives the general reader some idea of the changes which the psycho-analytic movement has brought about in the outlook of modern psycho therapy. Yet Dr. Brend obviously holds no brief for this school of thought alone. He describes, too, the parts which suggestion (including hypnotism), persuasion, re-education, and modified psycho-analysis have played in alleviating the mental sufferings caused by the war, the unwisdom of encouraging the patient merely to "distract his mind"whether by play or by work, the inadvisability of allowing important lost memories to remain lost, the uses of hypnosis in recovering repressed experiences, the indispens-ability of thorough-going psycho-analysis in some cases and its undesirability in others.