It is not clear how much use the army made of Yerkes’s tests. The long-term significance of the military involvement lay in the fact that, over the course of the war, Yerkes, Terman, and another colleague named C. C. Brigham carried out tests on no fewer than 1.75 million individuals.37 When this unprecedented mass of material had been sifted (after the war), three main results emerged. The first was that the average mental age of recruits was thirteen. This sounds pretty surprising to us at this end of the century: a nation could scarcely hope to survive in the modern world if its average mental age really was thirteen. But in the eugenicist climate of the time, most people preferred the ‘doom’ scenario to the alternative view, that the tests were simply wrong. The second major result was that European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin, with (surprise, surprise) darker people from the southern and eastern parts of the continent scoring worse than those fairer souls from the north and west. Third, the Negro was at the bottom, with a mental age of ten and a half.38
shortly after World War I, Terman collaborated with Yerkes to introduce the National Intelligence Tests, constructed on the army model and designed to measure the intelligence of groups of schoolchildren. The market had been primed by the army project’s publicity, and intelligence testing soon became big business. With royalties from the sales of his tests, Terman became a wealthy as well as a prominent psychologist. And then, in the 1920s, when a fresh wave of xenophobia and the eugenic conscience hit America, the wartime IQ results came in very handy. They played their part in restricting immigration, with what results we shall see.39
The last medical beneficiary of World War I was psychoanalysis. After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo, Freud himself was at first optimistic about a quick and painless victory by the Central Powers. Gradually, however, like others he was forced to change his mind.40 At that stage he had no idea that the war would affect the fortunes of psychoanalysis so much. For example, although America was one of the half-dozen or so foreign countries that had a psychoanalytic association, the discipline was still regarded in many quarters as a fringe medical speciality, on a level with faith healing or yoga. The situation was not much different in Britain. When The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was published in translation in Britain in the first winter of the war, the book was viciously attacked in the review pages of the British Medical Journal, where psychoanalysis was described as ‘abounding nonsense’ and ‘a virulent pathogenic microbe.’ At other times, British doctors referred slightingly to Freud’s ‘dirty doctrines.’41
What caused a change in the views of the medical profession was the fact that, on both sides in the war, a growing number of casualties were suffering from shell shock (or combat fatigue, or battle neurosis, to use the terms now favoured). There had been cases of men breaking down in earlier wars, but their numbers had been far fewer than those with physical injuries. What seemed to be crucially different this time was the character of hostilities – static trench warfare with heavy bombardment, and vast conscript armies which contained large numbers of men unsuited for war.42 Psychiatrists quickly realised that in the huge civilian armies of World War I there were many men who would not normally have become soldiers, who were unfit for the strain, and that their ‘civilian’ neuroses would express themselves under the terror of bombardment. Doctors also learned to distinguish such men from those who had more resilient psychoses but through fatigue had come to the end of their tether. The intense scrutiny of the men on the stage in the theatre of war revealed to psychology much that would not have been made evident in years and years of peace. As Rawlings Rees noted, ‘The considerable incidence of battle neurosis in the war of 1914–18 shook psychiatry, and medicine as a whole, not a little.’ But it also helped make psychiatry respectable.43 What had been the mysteries of a small group of men and women was now more widely seen as a valuable aid to restoring some normality to a generation that had gone almost insane with the horror of it all. An analysis of 1,043,653 British casualties revealed that neuroses accounted for 34 percent.44
Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried, and in its classical form it took too long to have an effect. But that wasn’t the point. Both the Allied and Central powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviours could not in any sense be called malingering. And such was the toll of men in the war that clinics well behind enemy lines, and even back home, became necessary so that soldiers could be treated, and then returned to the front.45 Two episodes will show how the war helped bring psychoanalysis within the fold. The first occurred in February 1918, when Freud received a copy of a paper by Ernst Simmel, a German doctor who had been in a field hospital as a medical staff officer. He had used hypnosis to treat so-called malingerers but had also constructed a human dummy against which his patients could vent their repressed aggression. Simmel had found his method so successful that he had applied to the German Secretary of State for War for funds for a plan to set up a psychoanalytic clinic. Although the German government never took any action on this plan during wartime, they did send an observer to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918 in Budapest.46 The second episode took place in 1920 when the Austrian government set up a commission to investigate the claims against Julius von Wagner–Jauregg, a professor of psychiatry in Vienna. Wagner-Jauregg was a very distinguished doctor who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work on the virtual extinction of cretinism (mental retardation caused by thyroid deficiency) in Europe, by countering the lack of iodine in the diet. During the war Wagner-Jauregg had been responsible for the treatment of battle casualties, and in the aftermath of defeat there had been many complaints from troops about the brutality of some of his treatments, including electric-shock therapy. Freud was called before the commission, and his testimony, and Wagner-Jauregg’s, were soon seen as a head-to-head tussle of rival theories. The commission decided that there was no case against Wagner-Jauregg, but the very fact that Freud had been called by a government-sponsored commission was one of the first signs of his more general acceptance. As Freud’s biographer Ronald Clark says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.47