abreaction: Take Two

[John.Hamill at vuw.ac.nz]

Before there is a storm of messages referring to Steven Weissenberger's
"Companion"... The gloss there uses Jung and the practise of abreaction
after the Great War.  The interesting extra piece of information
I just stumbled across recently was about the specific practice
of abreaction in the autumn of 1944 by William Sargason and others
in conjunction with drugs, as a treatment both for shell shocked soldiers
and for the treatment of stressed civilians in the Blitz.  Sargason
refers specifically to the stress caused by the V2. 

The reason why I bring this up, is that Sargason cites as his primary 
inspiration for the use of drugs in abreaction as being the very late
translation of "The Book" (Pavlov's v. 2 Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes).
Abreaction in that instance became connected to Pavlovian ideas about 
conditioning.

A further note.  Weisenburger quite rightly points out that one of Pavlov's  
collaborator's Dr Horsley Gantt translated "The Book" in 1941, but goes on
further to say that "there is not particular purpose to the secrecy of
Pointsman Spectro, and others who "rotate" their lone copy"  and calls
it "A bit of melodrama from the narrator".  However, Sargason recalls, (as
does the narrator), that most of the editions of "The Book" were actually
destroyed by a bomb earlier in the blitz... yet again GR comes up with
perverse historical accuracy.  Hence the importance of the book is not
about secrecy... but about the rarity of the text.


The source of this information comes from a curious little book called 
"The Battle for the Mind" by W Sargason....  paranoid thought, is Sargason
the model for Pointsmann?

John.