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142 e i g h t Neurological Objection: Rehabilitating the Event Psychotherapeutic experience on the battlefield gave birth to a renewal of the paradigm of psychoanalysis itself. — f r a n ç o i s e d a v o i n e a n d j e a n - m a x g a u d i l l i è r e , History Beyond Trauma All those who “saw themselves dead” are psychically traumatized. It is not only a matter of the “imaginative” apprehension of death, but the sudden and inaugural perception of “one’s own death” as something imminent and unavoidable: the revelation of something mysterious, grave, and definitive that has no meaning except perhaps as an introduction into nothingness. — l o u i s c r o c q , Les traumatismes psychiques de guerre Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning. — j u d i t h l e w i s h e r m a n , Trauma and Recovery At the end of August 1914, a Lieutenant Kauders was wounded near Lublin by Russian gunfire. On September 9, nine days after being wounded, he was diagnosed with a skull fracture. Kauders had trouble walking, the two sides of his body fell out of unison, his vision was impaired, and he suffered from affective disturbances and apathy. The Arbitration Commission declared him an invalid and sent him home to Berlin. Later, in 1917, probably because officers were hard to come by, his classi fication as an “invalid” was reevaluated. That autumn, Kauders appeared once again before the military commission, which ordered him to report Neurological Objection 143 to Vienna. To his great astonishment, he was sent to Garrison Hospital No. 1 and placed in a room like a prison cell with iron bars. His neighbor, a Turkish officer who was clearly mentally ill, screamed all through the night. The following day, Kauders was taken by ambulance to the WagnerJauregg clinic, where he remained in an isolation room for seventy-seven days. The deplorable hygienic conditions and the brutality of the guards were nothing in comparison to the sessions of faradization, which WagnerJauregg implemented himself. A metallic brush charged with electric current was applied to sensitive parts of his body such as the testicles and the tips of the toes while an audience shouted at him: “Miserable malingerer !” “You’re in for it!” The pain was intolerable: “On treatment with a strong electric current, the patient begins to weep loudly and lament with pain.”1 “I was quite intentionally exposed to torture,” Kauders claims in his report.2 At no moment did the psychiatrists accept the diagnosis of brain damage, and so they focused their efforts on using electricity to make the patient confess to malingering. Unable to extract such a confession, they ended up discharging Kauders with the diagnosis of “traumatic hysteria.” Eissler comments: “I have referred to all the medical findings and reports. . . . Their gist is this: The greatest German neurologist and an important Viennese specialist in internal medicine were sure, or nearly sure, that Kauders had suffered an organic injury to the cerebrum. Wagner-Jauregg was sure that Kauders was a malingerer.”3 The neurological diagnosis was thus fallaciously transformed into a psychiatric diagnosis. Nonetheless, detailed examination of the expert neurological reports shows that, if Kauders was not the victim of serious damage to the central nervous system, he did suffer from a hematoma that formed after a skull fracture. Eissler asserts: It was already known at that time that the absence of external injury by no means excluded internal damage. As early as 1895 Strümpell expressed himself unambiguously about the matter: “Even after relatively slighter wounds (caused by thrusts, blows and the like) we can rarely dispute the possibility of resulting hemorrhages, either in the meninges and the surface of the brain or in the deeper part of the brain” . . . Sänger wrote (in 1915): “After grenade explosions, even where there is no external injury, peculiar disturbances occur, the cause of which needs further investigation (meningeal hemorrhage and the like” . . . Bonhoffer (1917) wrote: “The anatomical findings of multiple clinical [3.17...

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