"Shell Shock" and Film in the First World War

Sigmund Freud believed that it was not possible to represent psychoanalytic “abstractions” “in plastic form”, and many historians, particularly those of a psychoanalytic bent, have taken him at his word, either not seeking, or dismissing, visual records of trauma.  Yet Freud’s colleague and friend Sandor Ferenczi was amazed by the symptoms he observed when he visited the ‘war neurotics’ wing of Budapest hospital in 1916 and commented on the soldiers’ paralyses, contorted limbs and limps that “[such] peculiar gaits [were] possible only to be reproduced by cinematography.”  Although Ferenczi never pursued this impulse, fellow doctors in Austria-Hungary and in Germany, as well in the Entente countries, were doing exactly what he described – documenting the “peculiar gaits,” tics and tremors of their ‘shell-shocked’ patients on film. Their decision to do so was neither unanticipated nor unprecedented, but was consistent with a tradition of using visual media to document, diagnose and occasionally treat mental illness established by asylum psychiatrists fifty years earlier, and developed by neurologists such as Jean-Martin Charcot and his followers. What was novel about the work of Ferenczi’s contemporaries and their immediate predecessors, however, was their choice of a relatively new technology—cinematography—to capture moving images of their stricken patients.

In this paper, I explore the rationale behind using film to document ‘shell shock’, highlighting the remarkable similarity in the language used to describe both war neurosis and cinema as experiences determined by suggestion and psychic contagion, especially in Germany and France. Using published and archival evidence (both visual and documentary), I argue that the pre-Freudian conviction that emotion was a bodily—rather than simply an embodied—phenomenon, informed the use of film, which was itself viewed as a more immediate emotional medium.  My research suggests that it is necessary to revisit traditional historiographical assumptions about the contemporary reach of psychoanalysis.