I mean war always has been a part of our life since the first civilizations was established. I’m sure “shellshock” wasn’t only caused by artilery shots.
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The history of trauma was consistently learned, and then subsequently forgotten, throughout our history. Often, this research was pursued on account of some kind of political or social movement, or a war, and when these social movements died out, so too did interest in understanding trauma and trauma related disorders.
In the late 1800s, Pierre Janet and Freud worked a great deal trying to understand the affliction of ‘hysteria’ during one of the early feminist movements in France . In one paper, Freud wrote about how he believed childhood sexual abuse was at the core of the ‘hysteria’ diagnosis. Unfortunately, this didn’t sit well with him, nor with the public at that time, as it implied incest was not only common, but was occurring in the homes of powerful individuals, and individuals Freud himself was friends with. As a result he abandoned this line of thinking, and instead started chasing his ridiculous ideas that early childhood sexual abuse wasn’t real, and that the women who talked about it instead secretly wanted it. The feminist movement eventually died out, and people mostly lost interest in the hysteria diagnosis and trauma in general.
After WW1, interest in trauma again spiked. The new brutality of modern warfare and trench warfare was being discovered and experienced en masse for the first time, and as a result, this war was much more devastating psychologically, relative to earlier points in human history. At this point, many soldiers who succumbed to shellshock were labeled as being somehow ‘less’ than their untraumatized comrades. Less strong; less manly; less stoic. Again, after the war ended, interest in trauma waned.
The cycle repeats itself for WW2, and eventually culminates in the research that occurs in the 70s and 80s after Vietnam, the anti-war movements, and the feminist movements of these time periods bring renewed interest into trauma of combat, trauma of sexual violence, and trauma of childhood abuse and childhood sexual abuse. Eventually, in the 80s, we create the formal PTSD diagnosis. Since these times, our understanding and research into trauma has thankfully not been forgotten, and we seem to be making great strides into becoming more informed on the effects of trauma, neurobiologically, and developmentally.
However, we knew and understood about trauma and even ‘shellshock’ and the effects of war on soldiers, long before the shellshock diagnosis. WW1 just made the effects of combat trauma far more widespread, common, and devastating.
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