ABSTRACT
The term “shell shock,” which is usually applied to the psychoneuroses of the war, is an unfortunate and misleading term. “Shell shock” was loosely used to designate a large and little understood group of cases which puzzled the medical officers. Ordinarily “shell-shock” cases are divided into two groups: conversion hysteria and anxiety states. In the conversion hysteria the effect of the repressed wish for escape is converted, in psychoanalytic terms, into the organic symptom which, by creating a state of military disability, satisfied the wish to escape. The anxiety states and their various symptoms have not fitted quite so readily into the psychoanalyst’s scheme for interpretation. The general difference of the anxiety state from the conversion hysteria is attributed to the difference in the ideational content of the escape wish entertained by the patient prior to the onset of the neurosis.
