ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to retell the story of shellshock and its treatment and explores its social construction as an illness. It looks at the problems shellshock presented to the British army and its doctors, examining some of the arguments it provoked in military and medical circles. The chapter also aims to investigate the ways in which the clinical phenomena it encompassed were constituted by military social relations – paying particular attention to the organization of life and work in trenches and in army hospitals. In order to get an idea of the upheavals caused by shellshock one could begin by looking at the changing fortunes of psychotherapy following the First World War. If the psychoanalysts made a dramatic entry onto the medical stage during the war so too did the British psychologists. W. H. Rivers, William McDougall, and William Brown all made important contributions to the study of shellshock and established medical reputations on the basis of their wartime work.
