What Did You Do in the War, Doctor?

[Dave Monroe]

The problem with the V-2 rocket, wrote George Orwell from London, at a
time when the German Wehrmacht was hurling thousands of them at the
city, is that “unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to
think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming
noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won’t stop. You want to
hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance
before the engine cuts out. In other words, you are hoping that it
will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an
ordinary bomb—but in that case you have only about five seconds to
take cover and no time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of
the human being.”

There was a lot of that sort of morbid speculation going on in Britain
during the war. Over five years, air raid sirens went off in London
1,224 times, or about once every thirty-six hours. Nerves frayed, and
uncomfortable questions cropped up amidst the ruptured pavement and
blasted buildings. Was it all right to feel fear? To hate? To,
perhaps, find something thrilling about it all?

It was an auspicious time to ask such questions. As Michal Shapira
argues in The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of
the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain, Britain, by offering refuge to
those fleeing the Nazis, unwittingly turned itself into the
international center of psychoanalysis....

[...]

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/book-review/what-did-you-do-in-the-war-doctor/

http://www.berfrois.com/2015/04/freud-tended-to-dodge-political-questions/

The War Inside
Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in
Postwar Britain

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-british-history/war-inside-psychoanalysis-total-war-and-making-democratic-self-postwar-britain

Return from the Natives
How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300187854
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