Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Space Between the Wars
- 2 Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses
- 3 Witnessing and Survival: The Challenge of ‘Autognosis’ in the Interwar Years
- 4 Wartime Revisited: Ghosts and Spirits in Sassoon's Patriotic Verse of the Second World War
- 5 Look Back to ‘Gladness’: Nostalgia and Sassoon's Personal Poems, 1940–5
- 6 Narcissism and Autognosis: Sassoon, 1936–42
- 7 Liminal Moments, Uncanny Spaces: Sassoon's Autobiography and the Modern Subject
- Conclusion
- Index
2 - Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Space Between the Wars
- 2 Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses
- 3 Witnessing and Survival: The Challenge of ‘Autognosis’ in the Interwar Years
- 4 Wartime Revisited: Ghosts and Spirits in Sassoon's Patriotic Verse of the Second World War
- 5 Look Back to ‘Gladness’: Nostalgia and Sassoon's Personal Poems, 1940–5
- 6 Narcissism and Autognosis: Sassoon, 1936–42
- 7 Liminal Moments, Uncanny Spaces: Sassoon's Autobiography and the Modern Subject
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Trauma
Early conceptions of traumatic neurosis have a great deal in common with the aetiology of nostalgia. In 1688 Johannes Hofer attributed the disease to an ‘afflicted imagination’, noting in patients the persistence of melancholy, relentless preoccupation with home, disturbances of sleep, images of home recurring in dreams, loss of strength and appetite, fever, heart palpitations and stupor. He also speculated that a physiological alteration of channels transferring ‘spirits’ between brain and body underlaid these symptoms. In nineteenth-century Europe, similarly strange symptoms, partial paralyses and other bodily malfunctions arose in those who experienced industrial or railway accidents. In Britain, this was called ‘railway spine’. In America, during the Civil War, a soldier's nervous exhaustion on the battlefield was attributed to ‘windage’, the incalculable result of exposure to the shock waves of cannon fire. The transforming power of these shocking interactions between the human subject and the machinery of modernity compelled early physicians of the modern industrial age to assume that the trauma of the accident must have produced some underlying organic change. This assumption was slow to leave medical epistemology. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, physicians began to explore more closely the connection between the memory of the shocking experience and the ensuing alteration of the self. Hofer's idea that the impressions which lead to nostalgia can reappear in our dreams is an almost exact prefiguring of the relation between traumatic experience and dream in psychoanalytic terms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modern NostalgiaSiegfried Sassoon Trauma and the Second World War, pp. 28 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008