slevin, wound wwi emobied being psychoanalysis

The Wound and the First World War:‘Cartesian’ Surgeries to EmbodiedBeing in Psychoanalysis, Electrificationand Skin Grafting

TOM SLEVIN

The emergence of modern warfare was premised upon humanity’s technologicaland industrial development. Indeed, the world’s greatest challenge throughout the20th century was to avoid self-destruction through its own tools; now, humanity’sgreat crisis of the 21st century is an ecological one.

This article is directly concerned with the historical moment and culturaltrauma of the First World War. Europe underwent rapid cultural transformationthroughout modernity, yet, as Stephen Kern comments: ‘It is one of the greatironies of the period that a world war became possible only after the world hadbecome so highly united’ (1983: 24). As the 20th century approached, a ruptureoccurred between the development of technological modernity and the culturefrom which it arose. Kern argues that outmoded autocratic political bodies provedunable to manage the new dynamic of modernism, resulting in war. As Paul Fussellwrites: ‘In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because twopersons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot’ (1977:

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7–8). It is therefore the collision between technological and cultural developmentthat frames this article. More specifically, it is the rupture between the speed,dynamism and simultaneity of modern life and existing ‘pre-modern’ Europeansubjectivities and institutions. In the first months of war, a vast number of un-explained casualties were produced, without bodily injury. For the first time, ona mass scale, the embodied human being was inserted into a completely new andutterly traumatic modern environment. This highlighted the inability of stateinstitutions and technologies to deal with the consequential problems.

The first three sections of this article examine the experience of war and theinherent problem of the existing mind–body dualism in the ‘Cartesian surgeries’of psychology and electrification employed by the state in response to the traumato embodiment. In psychoanalysis the subject was imagined as possessing an ‘egoboundary’ that became shattered through an excess of stimulation, while electri-fication directly worked upon the body using an invisible force in order to recoupthe subject as an ideologically docile soldier. In the final section, the article re-thinks this idea of the body, conceptualizing it through the representation of thewound and deconstructing the traditional self–other, container–contained, binarydistinctions that informed the state’s attempt to deal with the new and little under-stood pandemic. ‘Embodied’ being, pain, the wound, resist easy assimilation intosuch a framework, yet the trauma was conceptualized as a Cartesian problem, andit was this epistemology that informed the state’s subsequent care for the subject,rather than the soldier’s own embodiment.

Technology and Subjectivity

The institutions of Europe were unprepared for the crisis in embodied subjectivitythat occurred as a consequence of the outbreak of war in 1914. Some avant-gardemovements – notably Futurism – had anticipated and attempted to representsubjective responses to modernity based on a new dynamic, phenomenologicalinteraction between self and environment. However, for the majority of the West,the emergence of new modes of Being in a culture of modernity – the reconfig-uration of the subject’s relation to the environment through the alteration of itstime and space brought about by technology – arrived literally as shock. As WalterBenjamin observed:

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the opensky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath theseclouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile humanbody. (1977 [1936]: 84)

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The unprepared soldier was subject to a different phenomenological order thanhe had hitherto experienced. While the body of the soldier had undergone adegree of prosthetic enhancement, through the rapid mechanical development ofhis weapons such as the machine gun, the nation-state had only begun to managebodies of soldiers, not embodied soldiers. The human mind remained as fragileas before, being still based on classical constructions of subjectivity and subjectto Victorian ideals of bravery and honour. War proceeded from, as Fussell notes,a ‘static world, where the values appeared stable. . . . Everyone knew what Gloryand what Honor meant’ (1977: 21). Indeed, Fussell actually points to the influ-ence upon soldiers of ‘a hero of medieval romance of his imagination. . . . Formost who fought in the Great War, one highly popular equivalent was Victorianpseudo-medieval romance’ (1977: 135). This subject was more at risk in face ofthe unprecedented destruction it now faced: a medieval hero hurling himselftowards the enemy would have his body torn apart through a simultaneousshower of bullets. The Western production of a soldier’s subjectivity along suchlines became destabilized amidst a new configuration in the relations between thesubject and the environment – the dynamic between self–space–time creating amass embodied trauma hitherto unseen, and for which the state was unprepared.As Wendy Holden writes, just one month after the outbreak of war, Britain beganreceiving cases of soldiers suffering from a previously unknown form of mentalbreakdown: ‘Tens of thousands more were to follow. No one had expected themand no arrangements had been made’ (1998: 13).

Victor Tausk, an Austrian psychoanalyst recruited for psychiatric work duringthe war, perceived that the new demands on subjectivity made by technologicaldevelopment were highly traumatic. Tausk came to believe that existing stateapparatuses were outmoded: ‘To the best of my belief, my subject has no scientifichistory. I am not aware that any previous work has been done on the psychologyof the deserter’ (1991 [1916a]: 142). In addition to the failure of the state in dealingwith the psychology of trauma, as it continued to maintain the mythic ‘heroic’attitudes as a standard, its judicial measures were also archaic. Tausk wrote that:‘Laws do not change as quickly as men’s views and way of living’ (1991 [1916a]:143). Indeed, he identified a ‘way of living’ that is in conflict with the ordered,measured space of condemnation in the courtroom, that of self-preservationin the face of the chaotic environment the subject experiences under artillerybombardment, gas attack or machine-gun fire. Tausk reached the Kierkegaardiannotion of the cultural relativity of right and wrong, good and evil, believing thatexisting laws no longer adequately represented a transformed culture. Controver-sially, he argued that the traditional fictions constructed around military perform-ance are transformed into the realities of survival and therefore the soldier should

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not be accused of crimes that no longer bear any relation to the traumatic realityof modern warfare: ‘[the soldier] is interested only in saving his own skin in thedreadful devastation that has come over the world’ (1991 [1916a]: 143). Medievalmyths had no place in modern warfare. Modern warfare induced ‘a crazy mindlessfear . . . and . . . [the soldiers’] valour consisted in surviving an inconceivableordeal’ (1991 [1916a]: 148). Indeed, he pointed towards the failure of existingpsychiatric institutions to understand and treat diverse cases, while tending togroup diverse symptoms ‘into terminological pigeon-holes’ (1991 [1916b]: 128).One example of this was the term ‘neurasthenia’. This was initially applied as adiagnostic term for the condition of nervous exhaustion, if only to avoid the‘feminizing’ term ‘hysteric’. Later, ‘shell shock’ became a generalized misnomerfor what, as Holden (1998: 19–20) charts, became known after thousands of casesas ‘kriegneurose’ in Germany and ‘la confusion mentale de la guerre in France’.The Times wrote of this new phenomenon as ‘The Wounded Mind’ and ‘Woundsof Consciousness’. ‘Shell shock’, as a term, was developed after one soldier, whohad become trapped in barbed wire in no-man’s land, had several shells explodearound him. While no bodily injury could be found, he exhibited somatic symp-toms, becoming partially blind and losing his sense of taste or smell. Accordingto a senior lecturer in military psychiatry at the time, the term:

. . . made much sense. It captured what was happening. There were lots of shells around. Therewere lots of blasts, lots of shock, and people – after being blown up or buried after an explosion– were in a state of shock. It was a wonderful term. (quoted in Holden, 1998: 18)

The dominant psychiatric terms such as ‘neurasthenia’ and ‘shell shock’ werebased on the notions of an exhausted physicality (especially as ‘mind wounds’were not always socially acceptable) and a disruption of a Cartesian economy ofbody and mind. In other words, for example, it came to be believed that an excessof stimulation upon the body consequently splintered the mind. In the ‘shellshock’ example above, excess mental stimulation produced somatic symptoms.An excess upon one would ‘economically’ fracture the other. However, perhapsit is a soldier’s own words, not a psychiatric text dominated by certain discur-sive ideology, that gives more insight into the trauma of warfare to embodiedsubjectivity:

To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismem-bered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support. . . . The most solidnerves cannot resist for long. (quoted in Holden, 1998: 11)

The first instances of a new, mass-produced, type of wounding through modernwarfare occurred in the American Civil War, producing the first cases of the‘mind wound’ following such a fracturing of subjectivity. Indeed, the history of


warfare is paralleled by rises in substance abuse – from whisky in the Civil Warto marijuana in Vietnam – an ‘economic’ attempt by the subject to negate theimpact of fragmentation upon the internal coherent principles of subjectivity inthe fracturing experience of war: in other words, an escapist response to trau-matic conditions. Alcohol abuse in Britain during the First World War promptedChancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who later became PrimeMinister for the duration of the war until 1922, to declare in January 1915 thatwhile ‘fighting Germans, Austrians and Drink . . . as far as I can see the greatestof these foes is Drink’. Similar problems around alcohol consumption occurredin Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Italy. Russia even attempted to outlawvodka in August 1914. The qualitative transformation of subjectivity as a resultof alcohol abuse was, unsurprisingly, preferable to the fracturing trauma ofmodern warfare. Again, Tausk is incisive, recognizing the problems in ‘On thePsychology of the Alcoholic Occupation Delirium’ as a response to subjectivetrauma, ‘most toxicoses make their appearance as states of confusion. The chiefsymptoms are temporal and spatial dislocation, total misconstruction of environ-ment’ (1991 [1915]: 96). Summarizing rather more simply, he states: ‘Alcoholismhas then to fulfil a twofold task; to daze the mind so that the painful reality isforgotten, and to provide a surrogate pleasure’ (1991 [1915]: 112). The turn tosubstance use is a turning away from the immediate environment of shock, ofimmediate devastating instants, and towards insulated blurs. Fussell notes furtherconsequences of the actual importance of alcohol to the Allied powers, citing onemedical officer’s note regarding the treatment of ‘shell shock’ that: ‘Had it notbeen for the rum ration I do not think we should have won the war’ (1977: 47).On the other hand, he notes, a ‘spectacular’ German advance stopped, then fellapart, when they ‘halted to loot, get drunk, sleep it off’ (1977: 17), after beingdeprived of alcohol through the Allied blockade. The ensuing counter-attack wassignificant, as it broke through German lines and continued to the end of war.

Psychologies at War

While Tausk was ahead of his time in some ways, in others he was conservative:he conformed to the prevailing psychological tendency to regard the body as aCartesian container of the mind. This view is most clearly established in ‘On theOrigin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia’ (1991 [1919]). Tausk alsowas a devoted disciple of Freud, whose project has been criticized for its neo-Cartesian framework, that is, updating body–mind dualities within a pseudo-scientific discourse. While Freud did not write a great deal on psychiatry andwar, he nonetheless speculated upon it in several places. In his introduction to


Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses (1950 [1919]), he proposed the existence of‘danger-neuroses’, caused by the conflict between libidinal repression and preser-vation of the ego that involves protection against stimuli as the source of dangerof the shock. The theory in many ways appears as an adaptation of the existingcommon psychological symptom ‘neurasthenia’ in terms of a subject that couldbe fractured due to excesses of stimuli. Just a year later, in his essay ‘Beyond thePleasure Principle’, Freud writes: ‘In the case of quite a number of traumas, thedifference between systems that are unprepared and systems that are wellprepared through being hypercathected may be a decisive factor in determiningthe outcome’ (1991 [1920]: 303). In other words, the ego must discharge the excessof stimulus otherwise ‘trauma’ will result, and the ability to do this successfully,he suggests, is a certain training of subjectivity. The problem of the Great Warwas the use of conscripted men. As Fussell notes in the war, ‘By the middle ofNovember [1914] these exertions had all but wiped out the original Britisharmy’ (1977: 9). Conscription meant an influx of men who were not adequatelyprepared for the conditions of war and cathecting mental processes, as ‘anincrease of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normalway, and this must result in permanent disturbances of the manner in which theenergy operates’ (Freud, 1991 [1917]: 315). This prepared the way for Freud’sobservation in 1920 that the fracturing of subjectivity through the hyperstimuli(as in warfare) can economically be avoided if it is instead inscribed on the bodilysurface: ‘a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against thedevelopment of a neurosis’ (1991 [1920]: 281), as in tendencies for soldiers toself-mutilation. This reveals something about Freud’s view of the subject, placingthe mind inside the body, arguing that the bodily wound alleviates the ruptureof the mind through its projected displacement. Indeed, the transference ofsymptoms from the mind to the body consistently reappears in Freud’s work.This is temporary, however, a deferral, as self-harm is subject to repetition,whereby the cathexis does not deal with the original experiential rupture. AsDidier Anzieu notes, ‘Mutilations of the skin – sometimes real, but more oftenimaginary – are dramatic attempts to maintain the boundaries of the body andthe Ego and to re-establish a sense of being intact and self-cohesive’ (1989 [1985]:20). In this example, by inflicting pain upon the surface of the body, the actionis intended to reinforce the sense of the self’s boundaries. However, Freud in1920 is separating the body from the mind, even though he concedes they havea connection:

The rupture on the body displaces that in the mind. Thus the rupture of the body and mindare highly connected, and serve to offset each other. The trauma of the body thus can be identi-fied and projected to by that in the mind. (1920: 305)


The mind–body dualism is realized here by Freud; nevertheless they are mainlydivided throughout contemporary psychiatric discourse, even if Freud begins toconceptualize the importance of an embodied subject after the end of the war.

The reality of war lay not in neo-medieval myths of valour and bravery, ofdynamic action, but in inertia in many cases: where embodied reaction was denied,a suspension of reality developed. Reality bled into unreality as the subject’sresistance to trauma became a screen: ‘What protected me was a curious kind ofsense of unreality, which cocooned me against the reality of what was happening’(quoted in Holden, 1998: 76); or: ‘It was as though I had become another personaltogether, or, rather as though I had entered another life’ (quoted in Fussell,1977: 114). Other symptoms could be more dramatic as the case of Private ‘M’demonstrates. Having been forcibly restrained from suicide – that is, the heroic/insane act of individually confronting a German mortar attack – he was sent toEngland after becoming paralysed from the neck down and unable to speak.When examined, he ‘had no idea who or what he was and had no knowledge ofthe meaning of words. . . . He delighted in childish toys and in a general way hismind was that of a year-old child’ (Holden, 1998: 14–15). The trauma to subjec-tivity was symptomatized through regression to an infantilism where the phenom-enological relation to the world is, again (as in alcohol use) ‘cocooned’, nascent,more flexible and less inscribed by the demands of the state. Other examples ofthe subject’s symptoms of a schism between the will of the body politic andembodied will include the paralysis of the trigger finger, or the inability tospeak, as in the case of a senior officer when ordered to lead men to certain death.Indeed, subjective disorder was on such vast a scale that army statistics reveal40 percent of casualties in 1916 were ‘shell shock’ cases. This figure would havebeen higher but for an official cover-up of the scale of the problem. Further-more, there were many men who had not been properly diagnosed, as physicalinjury was far easier to diagnose, and for men to admit to, than ‘psychological’wounding.

The Body: Container and Boundary

If the subject was predominantly perceived to conform to the Cartesian mind–body dualism, in which the body acted as both the mind’s container and boundary,this was in accordance with a traditional Western conception of a ‘self’ that resideswithin a bodily core (indeed, Descartes attempted many surgeries of stripping thebody to find the ‘soul’ that he believed lay in the brain’s pineal gland, but thatevaporated upon death). Freud continued this binary approach to imagining thesubject, hypothesizing ‘the common traumatic neurosis as a consequence of an


extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli’ (1991 [1920]:303). Somehow, and this is something he shared with contemporary philosopherssuch as Georg Simmel, the ‘self’ could protectively insulate itself. Through alayering, a ‘psychic skin’ could be developed to negate ‘the breach in the shieldagainst stimuli’ (1991 [1920]: 303). To protect the interior self from trauma,concern was moved to the periphery of the body as opposed to its ‘Cartesiancore’, and the realization that the body is ‘open’, always in interaction with thesurrounding ‘other’. The body is therefore an open juncture, hybridizing self andother through its surface. As we have seen, great attention was given to the excessof stimulation, attack, to the surface of the body, and thus the mind lay suscep-tible to attacks outside the ‘skin ego’, imagined as a boundary against a traumaticenvironment. The body therefore needed to be ‘closed’ to protect the mind.Indeed, a common response to fear is to simplify the other as exterior, as alienand foreign, threatening subjective interiority from without, mortifying the ego,at first through the body. The idea of a rigid ego did not just appear in the workof Freud, but also in that of Tausk and of Paul Federn. The ‘ego boundary’ wasa concept formulated to describe a deficiency in the coherency of the self: if theego boundary became deficient, the subject subsequently displayed psychologicalsymptoms. This coherent boundary thus needed restoration in order to recoupthe subject from psychological fracture. Freud’s own development of this notionwas the ‘contact barrier’ in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ of 1895 (Freud,1966 [1895]). Tausk sums up the psychoanalytic assumption very succinctlywhen he discovers ‘a symptom in schizophrenia, which I have named “loss of egoboundaries”’ (1991 [1919]: 198). The problem is summed up as ‘weakness ratherthan excess, and the key to his disorder lay in the ego. . . . Only if the patient’sintegrating capacities were strengthened could the boundary between his innerand outer world become realistic’ (Roazen, 1975 [1971]: 313). The failure lies inthe subject who cannot regulate their peripheral boundaries to protect the fanta-sized core of their stable Cartesian self. Deleuze and Guattari’s more recent criti-cism of Freud’s treatment of Little Hans was directed precisely towards theinsistence on reinforcing his ego boundaries, that: ‘You will be allowed to live andspeak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed’ (2002 [1980]: 14).

The Cartesian epistemology of the body as a container for the self, despiteinherent problems in Descartes’ thought, nevertheless became translated intomodernity through the psychoanalytic terms of a boundary for the self: the ‘egoboundary’. Anzieu points out that even recent psychological approaches are stillbased upon this conception, as ‘the forms of pathology with which the psycho-analyst is increasingly faced in his practice today derive in large part from distur-bances of the container–contained relation’ (1989 [1985]: 11). The same practice


applies, whereby the analyst attempts to recoup the distinction between containerand contained through the restoration of a dividing ego boundary. This ‘barrier’is disrupted when the binary separation between self and other is disrupted. Forexample, the paranoiac believes that thoughts are stolen through the trans-gression of the imagined division beween self and other, but also, by the sametoken, thoughts are transmitted into them, at worst controlling their behaviour.Tausk highlights some interesting examples: first, that ‘In the course of appar-ently normal existence they had been taken over, as it were, by some alien ago’(1991 [1916b]: 150). Again, on the other hand, confronted with the traumaticenvironment of war and the constant threat to the coherency of self, the subjectwithdrew into the fantasy of a shell that excluded the other. However, if such animagined boundary became unstable, the subject was deemed to be sufferingfrom a mental deficiency.

Jacob Mohr’s picture Proofs from the Prinzhorn Collection – works assem-bled between 1918 and 1921, made by patients in psychiatric institutions in theprior 40 years – is a fascinating representation of the ‘ego boundary’. Mohr wasdiagnosed with dementia praecox paranoides (‘premature imbecility’, replaced bythe term ‘schizophrenia’ in 1911). The picture represents an unwanted trans-gression of the ‘other’ into the ‘interior’ subject. The ‘ego boundary’ is breachedand the self is controlled by an ‘influencing machine’. This is a terrifying schizo-phrenic example, as the imagined boundaries of the self are penetrated by a forcefrom without. The fantasy of exterior control testifies to the loss of self within,even if that rigid boundary does not exist in reality (indeed, living is very mucha perpetual negotiation between subjectivity and the other). The loss of self here‘is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity,magnetism, or X-rays’ (Tausk, 1991 [1919]: 187). Indeed, Tausk refers to casesthat create an ‘influencing machine’ as a machine that is operated by the subject’senemies: ‘Buttons are pushed, levers set in motion, cranks turned. The connec-tion with the patient is often established by means of invisible wire leading intohis bed’ (1991 [1919]: 187). One consequence of the threat to the self’s integrityis the widespread use of harsh, bold lines when the patient draws their body,‘executed in one motion and neither retraced nor corrected’ (Bader, 1961: 47).The schizophrenic torment is evident in the continual attempt to imagine acoherent ego boundary, played out as the subject desperately draws secure lines.Indeed, the complaint existed that their thoughts were so corruptible that theyare ‘spread throughout the world and occur simultaneously in the heads of allpersons. The patient seems no longer to realize that he is a separate psychicalentity, an ego with individual boundaries’ (Tausk, 1991 [1919]: 199). Hans Steckmade the observation: ‘A schizophrenia patient suffering from a persecution


complex was in the habit of writing “keep the bodies whole” on every scrap ofpaper she could find and distributing these slips to patients and visitors’ (1961: 23).The same processes appear to play out in post-First World War pan-Europeanculture, as the dissolution of the body through the annihilating effects of moderntechnology in warfare was recouped in the shape of the body in its most idealform of integrity – a return to the fantasy of the classical form of the body.

Already, the imagination of the hermetic, impenetrable self can be seen in thedevelopment of the robot fantasy, representing in some ways the ideal modernCartesian subject. A number of stories envisioned the emergence of the robot,such as Electric Man (1885) by Luis Senarens, but most famously perhaps, KarelCapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1921). Here, a definite demar-cation of the body and other exists through a rigid, hard shell which housed themotor drive that works the body. Psychoanalysts were not above referring to theirsubjects in terms of their technological affinities. Freud uses a lot of mechano-scientific terms to describe the human subject: he describes drives, energy regu-lation, reactions, screen memories, syndromes, transferences, etc. For example,Freud employs an economic, mechanical, understanding of trauma, of ‘an increaseof stimulus to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this must resultin permanent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates’ (1991[1917]: 315). The human subject is viewed in terms of the economic regulationof energies. Tausk’s ‘Influencing Machine’ (1991 [1919]) cites the fantasy of themodern schizophrenic whose ego integrity is being ruptured through electro-magnetic waves, coming from a machine attempting to control that person.

In contrast to Freud, who rejected the electrification of the human as a courseof treatment, equating such advances in German neuropathology to an Egyptiandream-book, there were medical cultures that attempted to realize the fantasy ofconnecting man with electricity. Such an approach synthesized modernity’s fasci-nation with electricity (see Armstrong, 1998) with an existing Cartesian epistem-ology. A consequence was a direct electrical intervention upon the body in orderto regulate the mind. Confronted with the pan-European epidemic of shatteredsubjectivity, the body politic implemented a programme advocating experimentalscience in an attempt to restore the subject in accordance with its own ideals. Thepressures of the war, with its overwhelming need for and consumption of humanbodies, saw the use of technologies to reinsert the body back into war. Thetemporarily wounded needed to be rehabilitated, the fantasy of its ego boundaryrestored, while it also had to be docile in relation to the will of the state. Govern-ments at that time were more concerned with the application of bodies of menthan their minds, let alone the needs of an embodied subject. The electrificationof the subject was a Foucauldian nightmare as the state directly intervened upon


the subject through a mobile, transparent source of power. Disturbingly, theapplication of electricity to the soldier cannot be readily distinguished from thefantasies of those schizophrenic patients, whose claim to be influenced by invis-ible energies were dismissed as ‘madness’. In Germany, Dr Fritz Kaufmann‘devised his surprise-attack method for curing shell shock in one session’ (Holden,1998: 30) by applying high-voltage shocks to limbs affected by hysterical paraly-sis. As psychiatry was concerned with treating the ‘mind’ of the patient, whichfor senior military personnel was an infuriatingly lengthy process, so electrifica-tion sought to recoup the subject more directly through the treatment of the body.For the Allied powers, Lewis Yealland introduced ‘faradization’, inspired byKaufmann’s combination of shock through electricity, while enforcing Victorianideologies of what was expected of a man through the force of Yealland’s ownpersonality. Somehow, the ‘economy’ of suffering ‘needed’ to be greater than theoriginal trauma to restore the subject’s relation to reality.

The state ‘willed’ itself on the subject’s supposed duality – the mind throughthe shell of the body. With regard to ‘Private M’, mentioned above – the soldierwho had lost the ability to speak after fighting in some of the most horrific battlesof the war, including Mons, Marne and Ypres – Holden cites Yealland’s report:

He had been strapped down in a chair for twenty minutes at a time, when strong electricitywas applied to his neck and throat; lighted cigarette ends had been applied to the tip of histongue and hot plates had been placed in the back of his mouth. (1998: 50)

After an hour of continuous application of electricity and a contraction of uncon-trollable spasmodic proportions, he uttered a sound. Meanwhile, Yealland usedsuggestive techniques to inscribe ideologies of duty, control and masculinity. Inthis particular case, ‘the hysteria’ was seen to pass throughout the soldier’s body,and repeated electric shocks were applied to the affected twitching limb until thebody ceased such twitching. Such a technique became known as torpillage inFrance, while the Nobel Prize winner Julius Wagner-Hauregg was reported tohave killed numbers of his patients using such a method. In the 1930s thismethod developed into electro-convulsive therapy as well as the lobotomy, thatis, the removal of the brain’s frontal lobes in a medical attempt to re-engineer aproductive body.

While it is easy to demonize such practices and the individuals using them, asindeed has been done before, these practices must also be seen to arise from ahistorical moment at the juncture of Western philosophical traditions, moderntechnology and the state’s consuming need for bodies. Although not apparent atfirst, there are indeed fundamental similarities to more humane ‘psychological’treatment. The intervention on the body was similar in some ways to that on the


mind. As the ‘mind’ is constantly functioning, responding to what is around it,so the ‘body’ was seen as a site of perpetual interaction. Anzieu notes, the skin:

. . . cannot reject any vibro-tactile or electro-tactile sign; it can neither close like the eyes or themouth, nor be stopped up like the ears and nose. Nor is it encumbered with excessive verbiageas are the spoken and written language. (1989 [1985]: 14–15)

The skin is spatio-temporally continuous, in perpetual engagement with itsenvironment. Thus, from one point of view, it is the ideal site to treat trauma asit cannot refuse to talk or listen. The skin is an embodied organ that cannot bedualistically distinguished through the supposed distinction of container andcontained, self and other. For example, ‘pain’ that the subject experiences as aconsequence of something coming into contact with the body, lies at the juncturebetween the self and other. The phenomenon of pain exists only at the nexus andnot by itself, thereby suggesting a critique of such binary categories. Indeed, thesubjective response to pain is neither merely bodily nor mental, it is ‘embodied’,as Williams and Bendelow suggest: ‘[pain] needs to be seen as a fundamentallyembodied experience: one which combines both physical and emotional dimen-sions of human suffering’ (1998: 7). The pain caused by the contact of electricitywith the body constituted an invisible assault upon the subject, until subjectsagreed to be ‘cured’ by restoring their docile subjectivity.

The state therefore employed technologies to stratify the fissures in the, other-wise presumed coherent, subject. These ‘Cartesian surgeries’ upon the subjectconceived it as divided into the body (the container) and the mind (the contained),in order to remobilize the traumatized male into a productive soldier. In the caseof physical wounding, technologies of corporeal restructuring still applied,although this was perhaps a far more philanthropic exercise than that of elec-trification. Nevertheless, the use of plastic surgery to restore the ‘boundary’ ofthe body, suturing the corporeal trauma to erase the sign of its interaction withthe other, was still another technology to control the body through applying theboundary strata. In his introduction to the pioneering plastic surgeon HaroldGillies’ book Plastic Surgery of the Face (1920), W. Arbuthnot Lane commentsthat bodily wounds ‘are not only the constant source of distress and anguish, butmaterially lower the market value of the individual’ (1920: vii). While psychol-ogy identified the strength and weaknesses of the ‘ego boundary’, or the ‘contactbarrier’, in a continuation of the dualistic epistemology, the body was seen to existin various states of strength or weakness. The surface of the body was its ‘egoboundary’ that needed to be reinforced. It was the body that housed the mind,and corporeality that would bear the physical, easily identifiable marks of thecollision of flesh and technology. A disruption on the corporeal surface signified


the weakened body of the soldier, so, like psychology, surgery was literally beingresearched through practice, innovations made as surgical interventions proceededthrough the desire to re-establish the perceived rigid, coherent body of the soldier.The technique of plastic surgery of the face developed rapidly throughout thewar, as surgeons were presented with as many bodies as they could operate on.Although plastic surgery had existed since Roman antiquity, it became increas-ingly common after medical developments toward the body during the Enlighten-ment, together with modern advances in chemically altering the body, particularlyin the use of anaesthesia for the patient. During the war, Gillies, originally anotolaryngologist, came to be considered the father of modern plastic surgery,being allowed to develop facial surgery techniques over the bodies of thousandsof soldiers.

The Wound, the ‘Other’

The importance of plastic surgery was to maintain that sense of ego integritybeyond immediate work upon life-threatening conditions. The phenomenologi-cal horror of the wound lies not just in the revelation of corporeal interiority –that traditional sense of horror at the interior made exterior – but in the particu-lar individuality of each wound. Again, the subject underwent a process of ‘re-stratification’ of its boundaries at the site of trauma, in this case, the wound.Compared to other Cartesian surgeries depending on the maintenance of acoherent ego boundary, surgery also sought to restore bodily integrity, disruptedthrough the excess of stimulation. The wound demonstrates the juncture betweenself and other, and disrupts their supposed duality. The wound of the body,although treated as the mark of the ‘other’, nevertheless still belongs to the recon-figured flesh of the subject. Yet the wound demonstrates that human corporealityis not a barrier nor a boundary, but a site, a territory that is in constant inter-action with the environment. Of course, in war this dynamic makes traumaticmarks upon the body, but it should still be recognized that the subject is notcontained within a container against the outside world, but is in a continuousprocess with the ‘other’. The site of the wound is a configuration of forces thatcreate a new form, born in the collision of the properties of each force at the nexusof those energies. However, for Western culture, in its Cartesian development,therein lies the possibility of true horror – the alienation of one’s embodimentthrough its mutated assemblage with the materiality of the other. It is in this waythat the body no longer coherently belongs to the person – indeed, one’s ownbody never has truly belonged to oneself, despite the perpetual attempts of theperson to claim one’s body for oneself – but is always at the negotiated juncture


of self and other. The wound is therefore a manifestation of the interpenetratingnature of subjectivity and environment that is denied to the self through a culturebased upon rigid Cartesian distinctions. Embodied Being is not exclusivelyconstituted by and for the ‘self’, while also not completely dictated from without.There is no fixed, unchanging essence that is at the centre of Cartesian surgeries,though attempts to ‘restore’ the subject suggest precisely that. ‘Self’ and ‘other’are not oppositional, but rather part of the same process of being. However, giventhe hysteria of the state regarding ‘keeping the body whole’, mechanisms ofphysical intervention by the state were implemented to suture the open bodiesof soldiers into closed ones, to reinforce those ego boundaries, especially withthe hope of returning the body to the front. Figure 1 shows the collision of high-velocity projectiles and flesh, resulting in a hybridization of the two. In this case,Gillies writes on repairing depressed scars:

They are usually the result of the exit of a bullet, of the glancing blow of a fragment, or theentrance of a small shell of bomb fragment. The scar produced by an exit wound is stellate,while that of an entrance wound, though it may be irregular, is usually concentrated in themiddle of the depression. (1920: 38)


Figure 1 A few days subsequent to a double shell-woundSource: Gillies (1920: Figure 13)

The treatment that would be afforded to victims of this mechano-corporealirruption would of course initially be to improve the body’s functionality. Indeed,this was the concern of immediate surgery. More cosmetically, however, the inter-vention of plastic surgery was to restore the absence of the mark of the Otherupon the body. The removal of any trace of harm done to the surface of thebody became critical, even if those marks should be ‘badges of honour’ in theconfrontation with ‘the enemy’ (culturally, the possibilities and dangers of plasticsurgery are far more desirable than the disfiguring, although healed, wound).There has been considerable academic work on the production of signifiers onand through the body as important in claiming one’s body for oneself (such asin fashion and tattoos); however, the need for the absence of the sign occupies amore neglected area in the process of writing the body. The subject’s reclamationof the body is premised upon a desire to restore plastic cohesion, thereby recon-figuring the body’s condition prior to its encounter with the other. Therefore, itis a surgical process of cosmetically unwriting the body, as opposed to the writingof the body normally associated with the exercise of subjectivity over the body.More practically, however, the re-stratification of the body meant that it couldbe recycled and sent back out to the front, as well as reinserted back into society.Gillies comments upon his development of a method ‘which hastens the man’sreturn to duty and conserves the energies and time of the theatre staff for moreimportant work’ (1920: 38).

This reconstruction of the body – like psychological discourses and the invis-ible technique of electrification – is based upon not dealing with the site of trauma,but ‘re-layering’ the boundaries of the subject to restore the traditional sense of‘self’. A surgery of absence is crucial to restoring the subject’s sense of presence ofself, through the imagined removal of the ‘other’. Yet the effect of technologiesupon the body becomes most perceptible at points of tension and fault-lines.Indeed, techniques are most visible, and afford their own critique, when theprocesses break down. Plastic surgery demonstrates its own virtues as it attemptsto restore the body to the owner through ‘re-stratification’ over the site of thebody’s transgression with the other. At first, the process appears to be an un-writing, but within this is the setting of layers over the ‘deficiency’ in the imaginedbody-as-shell. Figure 2 shows an example of the surgeon’s attempt to re-layer thebody at the site of the collision of flesh and projectile through removing skinfrom elsewhere on the body and using it as a flap to cover the wound. At best,plastic surgery can restore the body aesthetically and improve its functioning,though at worst its excesses obviously do not ‘naturally’ benefit the body’sappearance. In the very worst cases, aesthetic surgery has been the cause of deathafter the body itself had found a homeostasis with the wound, as the remarkable


profile in Figure 3 shows. Despite the extent of the wound, it healed naturally;Gillies refers to it as: ‘a very remarkable example of the explosive type and it isinstructive to note how this patient’s enormous gaping wound healed withoutmore than ordinary surgical methods’ (1920: 49).

The subject lies at a critical point. Their own fundamental sense of an experi-ential self can be ruptured if they disown their body through the traumatic mis-recognition of themselves as ‘other’. Indeed, as part of the embodied being, at acellular level also, the body also will not always accept its own skin as a graft andwill attack it in an auto-immune response (as I discuss shortly). The subject thuslies between the two poles of accepting their body within their own sense ofembodiment, or seeing the body as external, a rejected traumatized shell. HenryTonks’ renditions of injuries are testament to the ambiguity of the wounded bodyas oscillating between being subject and object. Tonks had been educated at theSlade School of Art, developing a classically anatomical approach to representingthe body. His task was to make records of Gillies’ patients, for whom he wouldbe undertaking facial surgery. As Emma Chambers notes: ‘The studies of woundedsoldiers that Tonks drew at Aldershot occupy an ambiguous area somewherebetween portraiture and archival record, the aesthetic and the pathological’ (2002:13). Interestingly, Tonks’ classical education towards anatomically structured workappears to give way to a more phenomenological representation (see Figure 4),despite his official role in making medical records.


Figure 2 Rhinoplasty from chest, Gillies’ tube-pedicle methodSource: Gillies (1920: Figure 390)

The wound undermines Tonks’ ordered anatomy of the body. It is fascinatingto see how Tonks represented the wound, as something that evades the order andstructure of the anatomical draughtsmanship in which he had been trained. Thewound questions those dualistic boundaries between I and Other, interior andexterior, subject and object. His portraits are neither objective nor totally subjec-tive, the wound collapsing ‘self’ and ‘other’ as both. While the interesting aspectof Tonks’ work is the uncertain representation of the wound, even so, he confinesthe problem of the wound to an aberration of more classical, traditional idealism:‘I have done some . . . rather fine pastel fragments! One I did the other day of ayoung fellow with a rather classical face was exactly like a living damaged Greekhead . . .’ (cited in Chambers, 2002: 13). Despite Tonks’ approach to drawing, therepresentation of the wound moves the portraits into an irresolute position –Tonks may well have prided himself on his ability to draw classical features basedupon anatomical proportions, but the wound undermines that same order ofverisimilitude to which he refers. In his portraits, the wound is represented mostsubjectively, failing to be accommodated within the order of his ‘objective’ anat-omical representation. The portraits oscillate between objective and subjective


Figure 3 Condition on admissionSource: Gillies (1920: Figure 37)

studies without ever being either. Despite originating from the ‘self’, the bodyoccupies an ambiguous conceptual and material shift into other. These pastels arein direct contrast to other forms of bodily representation, most notably the reac-tionary ideology that informed the monumental body through the mass produc-tion of classical, ideal Greek youths throughout Europe, which showed no traceof the reality of war.

The actual process of surgery was to restore the body from its traumatizedcondition. Therefore Gillies sought to apply layers on the boundary. In a diag-nostic archaeology of the face’s structure he writes about understanding the lossto the biological body through a series of layers, ‘(1) the mucous lining, (2) thebony or cartilaginous support, and (3) the skin covering’ (1920: 5). Again, heemphasizes the reconstruction of strata, as the ‘restoration is designed from withinoutwards. The lining membrane must be considered first, then the supportingstructures, and finally the skin covering’ (1920: 8). The contours of the body aremade into a plaster cast with the aid of photographs and radiographs. These aretechniques that solidify the contact-boundary between body and other, so thatan archive of surface information can be built. This is then used to re-contourthe body in the process of unwriting the wound through the restoration of the


Figure 4 Early conditionSource: Drawing by Henry Tonks, in Gillies (1920: Figure 262)

physical boundary. While the reconfiguration of the body through the wound isa violation, the same could also be said about the intervention of plastic surgery.As in the case of Figure 3, the body’s harmonization with the wound was dis-rupted through the intervention of surgery and ended in fatality. Indeed, Gillieshimself recognized the dangers of surgery, and warned against something thatseems relatively innocuous:

In treating an early wound there is a natural disposition to try and close unsightly gaps. Moreharm than good is done thereby, as the reactionary swelling and the frequent suppuration causemore scar tissue than would otherwise have to be dealt with. (1920: 5–6)

The body reacts against further reconfiguration, as it is always in perpetual nego-tiation surrounding the homeostasis of itself with its surroundings.

There is nothing ‘natural’ about being used as an organic palimpsest. The bodyreacts against intervention, here, through swelling and suppuration – it producesdischarge against sources of threat, whether that is from without, or from itself(as in the case of auto-immune responses). Yet its own resistance to being re-written upon – the discharge produced to remove the object obstructing its ownhomeostasis – is irrigated by surgical techniques to allow greater invasion. Thebody is, then, seen less as a brutalized organism, but rather as a shell whoseenergies and flows must be regulated, once the ‘mind’ has been isolated andremoved through anaesthetic. In fact, the body’s own defences against furthersurgical intervention are a source of constant frustration to the plastic surgeon,operating somewhat inorganically, as Gillies himself admits: ‘sometimes in theend the repair undertaken is a compromise between surgery and mechanics’(1920: 8). The rewriting of the wound therefore invites the question of whetherit is preferable to die as a result of surgery or to be superficially disfigured to theextent of cultural exclusion (and this again raises the question of to whom thebody actually belongs, for both examples count social acceptance of the body asmore important than the subject’s own embodied condition). In the worst cases,drastic and dangerous surgery was undertaken in an economic relation to the‘mental life’ of the patient. The homeostatic harmony found by the body with thewound was undone so that the intervention of surgery could be made to repairsurface strata. Sometimes, necrosis occurred in tissue that had been transplantedas the body rejected its own grafting. If suppuration is a preliminary immunedefence, then: ‘In cases of suppuration, there may be necrosis’ (Gillies, 1920: 13).Indeed, Gillies describes a tragic case whereby ‘the patient after having survivedthe ordeal of the burn, lived and regained a certain amount of strength twentymonths after the injury, died as a late result of a plastic operation’ (1920: 388).The reaction of the body to aesthetic surgical intervention was a fatal one.


In regard to the problems caused by bodily intervention:

. . . the use of any foreign body is to be condemned whenever it is possible to substitute a graftfrom the patient himself. Any form of a foreign body is a tissue irritant, and tends to givetrouble early or late on. (Gillies, 1920: 12)

Gillies excelled in cutting flaps of skin away from parts of the body and re-attaching them to the traumatized site, sutured with the existing skin. This is theprocess of organic extraction and re-layering that occurred in the rhinoplastyoperation in Figure 2, and the skin pedicle process shown in Figure 5. Thisacknowledged the skin more as a living organism and less as a surface boundaryto suture. However, like the mechanic: ‘The preparation and manipulation of thevarious forms of skin-grafts with a nice judgement in their use constitute animportant part of the plastic surgeon’s stock-in-trade’ (Gillies, 1920: 16). Inaddition, electrical discharge, with its echoes of Yealland, was used on the bodyto force it to perform according to the medical will, as ‘vibro-massage for bone-lesions, diathermy, ionization, X and other rays, is part of the routine after-treatment’ (Gillies, 1920: 34). Increasingly, the body is treated as an electric shellfor mechanical intervention. While electric therapy is widely used today in a rangeof treatments, fundamentally it remains a process of controlling bodily tissue, ofmanipulating its functions through applying electricity in the strategic techniqueof the application of electrodes to flesh. Electricity is utilized by technologiesrestoring the boundary of the ‘self’, at some level realizing Jacob Mohr’s fearfulanticipation of the body as a terminus in the age of electrification.

Surgical techniques operated upon the body while the mind was anaesthetized.The body’s discharges were drained, its surface stratified and subjected to elec-trical applications and chemical alteration according to medical technologiesadhering to the will of the state. The process of rewriting the skin even createdcases in which the body attacked itself. The body’s own immunological agents nolonger identified the appropriate cells for regulation or expulsion; the continuedinterference in the body’s own attempts towards homeostasis was denied in themedical attempt to re-engineer the socially productive body. Cutting away,appropriating, rupturing, manipulating, repositioning and suturing the organ isan invasive process to restore the perceived deficiencies in the subject’s psychicand bodily ‘shell’, which was of such imagined importance. The interventionsof psychoanalysis, electrification and skin grafting imagined themselves to beworking on a Cartesian subject, making the mind/body available again for thetraumatic environment of war. However, as this article has suggested, the foun-dation upon which these ‘Cartesian surgeries’ are premised fundamentallyprecludes a notion of an embodied subject. In identifying certain treatments, Ihave suggested how these technologies belong to an existing epistemological


tradition in their cultural development. From psychoanalysis to electrification toplastic surgery, these very different procedures have fundamental similaritieswith regard to perceiving the subject as having a fixed ‘boundary’, imagined orphysical, which needed to be reinforced to protect the cultural fantasy of an


Figure 5 Photos and drawing showing facial reconstruction through suturing skin flapsSource: Gillies (1920: Figures 288–91)

insular self. I have attempted to show that the human subject should not necess-arily be conceived of this way, but rather considered as ‘open’, within a dynamicinteraction with its environment. The embodied subject could be consideredalong Anzieu’s more progressive – if still fragmented – suggestion of a restora-tive treatment, recognizing ‘the triple status of his body, as part of the Ego, partof the external world and a boundary between the Ego and the world’ (1989[1985]: 95). Subjectivity is produced by all three simultaneously, a temporal un-folding between them, rather than an internal self within a bodily or psychic‘skin’, the rigid ‘boundary’ or ‘container’. The subject is never a static, coherentobject, but is fundamentally imbricated within its environment: this was thecondition of modernity that proved so traumatic for Western culture at thishistorical moment.

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Tausk, V. (1991 [1915]) ‘On the Psychology of the Alcoholic Occupation Delirium’, in Sexuality, Warand Schizophrenia, trans. E. Mosbacher and others, ed. P. Roazen. London: Transaction.

Tausk, V. (1991 [1916a]) ‘On the Psychology of the War Deserter’, Sexuality, War and Schizophrenia,trans. E. Mosbacher and M. Tausk, ed. P. Roazen. London: Transaction.

Tausk, V. (1991 [1916b]) ‘Diagnostic Consideration Concerning the Symptomatology of the So-calledWar Psychoses’, in Sexuality, War and Schizophrenia, trans. E. Mosbacher and others, ed. P. Roazen.London: Transaction.

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Tom Slevin comes from both a media and art historical background. His interests are predominantlyin modern visual culture and he is specifically concerned with the representation of the body as acultural index for the relationship between the subject and society. His PhD, coming to submission,examines the transformation of the human subject in modern culture, as articulated within theEuropean avant-garde. He has also recently prepared an article on the ‘Other’ and technologicalmodernity in Tarkovsky’s film Solaris.


slevin, wound wwi emobied being psychoanalysis

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