Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses

Abstract

This article sees the neuroses produced by twentieth-century wars as a kind of pathological historical determinism, in which an experience of war erodes participants’ ability to forget it and the traumatic past begins to govern the subsequent thinking and behaviour of survivors. Past events become determining through the way in which they are repressed and recovered, in so far as they are made into images and ideas which become the form of fears, recognitions and judgments. We may see how the past becomes a determining idea in the case histories of shell-shock victims and more largely in the way the 1914–18 war was forgotten and buried in the 1920s, and resurrected and published in the 1930s. The first world war caused the second in so far as it generated a new idea of total war and loss, a new image of massive collective injury which continued to specify the deepest fears of the postwar generations, governing our expectations and avoidances.