ABSTRACT
For a time, particularly during the first half of the war, authors used the term "war psychosis" quite indiscriminately. Some did so perhaps in the expectation that mental disturbances arising out of war experiences would show specific clinical characteristics; others used it without any particular theoretical premises and without any particular sense of responsibility. The difficulties in the way of diagnosis in certain cases could be reduced to two main factors: ignorance or insufficient knowledge of the patients' language and its nuances and the social and cultural characteristics of the level of their prewar life. Clinical psychiatry has hitherto restricted itself to describing the symptoms under each main classification as primary or secondary, but has had no or only very superficial explanations to offer of the psychical mechanism of the individual symptoms. The paranoid symptom is, as always, explained by the threat of homosexual-narcissistic components from the unconscious.
