Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese, Editors, Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

This transnational, interdisciplinary study of traumatic neurosis moves beyond the existing histories of medical theory, welfare, and symptomatology. The essays explore the personal traumas of soldiers and civilians in the wake of the First World War; they also discuss how memory and representations of trauma are transmitted between patients, doctors and families across generations. The book argues that so far the traumatic effects of the war have been substantially underestimated. Trauma was shaped by gender, politics, and personality. To uncover the varied forms of trauma ignored by medical and political authorities, this volume draws on diverse sources, such as family archives and narratives by children of traumatized men, documents from film and photography, memoirs by soldiers and civilians. This innovative study challenges us to re-examine our approach to the complex psychological effects of the First World War.

Contents:
Ch. 1 Introduction

Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese
Part I Battles over Representations and Perceptions of Traumatized Men
Ch. 2 Losing Face: Trauma and Maxillofacial Injury in the First World War

Fiona Reid
Ch. 3 Screening Silent Resistance: Male Hysteria in First World War Medical Cinematography

Julia Barbara Köhne
Ch. 4 “Always Had a Pronouncedly Psychopathic Predisposition”: The Significance of Class and Rank in First World War German Psychiatric Discourse

Gundula Gahlen
Part II Traumatized Civilians in the Wake of the Great War
Ch. 5 Violence, Trauma and Memory in Ireland: The Psychological Impact of War and Revolution on a Liminal Society, 1916–1923

Justin Dolan Stover
Ch. 6 Gender, Memory and the Great War: The Politics of War Victimhood in Interwar Germany

Silke Fehlemann and Nils Löffelbein
Ch. 7 Subjectivities in the Aftermath: Children of Disabled Soldiers in Britain After the Great War

Michael Roper
Ch. 8 “Entrenched from Life”: The Impossible Reintegration of Traumatized French Veterans of the Great War

Marie Derrien
Part III Traumatized Medical Cultures
Ch. 9 Making Sense of War Neurosis in Yugoslavia

Heike Karge
Ch. 10 “Everything Ruined, Which Seemed Most Stable in the World…”: The German Medical Profession, the First World War and the Road to the “Third Reich”

Livia Prüll
Ch. 11 Violence and Starvation in First World War Psychiatry: Origins of the National Socialist ‘Euthanasia’ Program

Philipp Rauh
Part IV A Coda on Trauma
Ch. 12 Toward A Global History of Trauma

Mark S. Micale