In the autumn of 1914, soldiers began arriving at field hospitals with symptoms nobody could explain. They were mute, or blind, or paralysed, or shaking uncontrollably, or unable to remember who they were. They had no visible wound.
The army needed them treated quickly. One of the few tools available was hypnosis.
Shell shock
The term “shell shock” was first used in print in 1915, in an article in The Lancet by Charles Myers, a Cambridge psychologist serving as a doctor in France. At first the symptoms were thought to be caused by the physical concussion of exploding shells. Myers soon concluded otherwise: many of these men had never been near an explosion. The injury was to the mind.
He had begun trying hypnosis on such cases in November 1914, and in 1916 published an account of soldiers treated with it.
By the end of the war, British military hospitals had dealt with something like 200,000 cases.
How hypnosis was used
Several army doctors, including Myers and the psychologist William Brown, developed a similar approach.
- Induce hypnosis. Exhausted, frightened soldiers often responded readily.
- Recover the memory. Many could not recall the events before their breakdown. Under hypnosis they were encouraged to remember.
- Relive it. The soldier re-experienced the event with its full terror. This was called abreaction.
- Reintegrate it. The memory was then, in theory, reconnected with the rest of the man’s experience.
- Suggest recovery. Direct suggestions that the paralysis, the mutism or the tremor would go.
Brown believed that the emotional release itself was curative, and treated men as close to the front line and as soon after breakdown as possible. He was among the doctors at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where the poet Wilfred Owen was treated in 1917.
What it achieved
The results could be dramatic. A man who had been mute for weeks would speak. A paralysed arm would move. Memory would return.
But there were limits.
- Relapse was common, particularly when a man was sent back to the fighting.
- Removing a symptom did not mean removing the cause.
- The aim was often to return soldiers to duty, which was not the same as helping them recover.
- Doctors disagreed about whether reliving the trauma helped or harmed.
Hypnosis was also among the gentler treatments on offer. Others included electric shocks, isolation and bullying.
The Second World War
When war came again, the lessons were remembered. Hypnosis was used once more for what was now called war neurosis or battle exhaustion.
- Soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940 were treated with hypnosis for acute breakdown.
- American army psychiatrists and psychologists, among them John Watkins, used hypnotic techniques on combat trauma in military hospitals.
- Drugs such as barbiturates were often used to produce a similar state more quickly, a method sometimes called narcosynthesis.
One report from an army hospital described nine of 22 cases successfully treated with hypnosis over one to fifteen weeks, and noted that it worked best when the trauma was recent.
What the wars did for hypnosis
Freud’s rejection had pushed hypnosis to the margins. The wars pulled it back.
- Large numbers of doctors learned it out of necessity.
- It proved useful and quick.
- Several went on to study it scientifically afterwards.
- It helped lead to official recognition: the British Medical Association endorsed its medical use in 1955 and the American Medical Association in 1958.
The wars also helped establish that psychological trauma is real, and that it can produce physical symptoms in brave and healthy people.
What we would do differently now
Wartime hypnosis rested on assumptions that have not all survived.
Memory. It was assumed that hypnosis recovered accurate memories. We now know that it can produce vivid, confident and false ones. Some of what soldiers “relived” may have been partly constructed.
Abreaction. Forcing someone to relive a trauma at full intensity, without preparation, can make things worse. Modern trauma therapy is carefully paced.
Purpose. Treatment aimed at returning a man to the front is not treatment aimed at his wellbeing.
Consent. Soldiers under military discipline were hardly free to refuse.
Today the recommended treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder are trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy and EMDR. Hypnosis has a supporting role, mainly for calming and stabilising, in the hands of trauma-trained clinicians.
What still stands
- Stress and terror can produce real physical symptoms.
- These are not weakness or cowardice.
- Early, humane treatment helps.
- People in acute distress are often highly responsive to suggestion, for good or ill.
- A calm, confident clinician makes a difference.
Remembering them
Many shell-shocked soldiers were not treated with any kindness. Some were punished, and some were shot for cowardice or desertion. The doctors who insisted that these men were injured, not malingering, and who tried to treat them, were ahead of their time, even where their methods were flawed.
The bottom line
War forced medicine to take psychological injury seriously and to rediscover hypnosis. The techniques were crude by today’s standards, and some of their assumptions were wrong. But the central recognition, that the mind can be wounded and can be helped, was one of the lasting gains of a terrible century.
Next in the series: Can You Hypnotize a Chicken? The Truth About Animal Hypnosis
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.