Freud had postulated that dreams were a wish fulfillment. Not until 1920, in an address at an international congress of psychoanalysts, did he allow one exception: the case of traumatic dreams, dreams that recall recent

accidents or childhood traumas. And even this turned out to bc no real exception at all: Freud eventually understood traumatic dreams as fitting into his wish-fulfillment theory of dreams in that they embodied the wish to master the trauma by working it through.16 World War II A dreadful invention Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of WWII was the concept “total war,” with the systematic targeting of civilian populations, as

exemplified by the millions of deaths caused Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical by the Holocaust, the air raids on cities to break the morale of civilian populations, and the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite WWI, most armies were once again unprepared for the great number of psychiatric casualties and psychiatrists were often viewed as a useless Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical burden, as exemplified by a memorandum addressed by Winston Churchill to the Lord President of the Council in December, 1942, in the following terms17: I am Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen [psychologists and psychiatrists] … it is very wrong to disturb large numbers of healthy normal men

and women by asking the kind of odd questions in which the psychiatrists specialize. A merican psychiatry American psychiatrists made a major contribution to the study of combat psychiatry during WWII. In Psychiatry in a Troubled World, William C. Menninger18 shows how Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the lessons of WWI seemed at first to have been entirely forgotten by the American military: “during the initial battles in Africa, psychiatric no casualties were sent back to base hospitals, often hundreds of miles from the front. Only 5% of these were able to return to duty“ As explained by Jones,19 American planners, under the guidance of Harry Stack Sullivan, had selleck compound believed that potential psychiatric casualties could be screened out prior to being drafted. Correspondingly, no psychiatrists were assigned to combat divisions and no provision for special psychiatric treatment units at the field army level or communications zone had been made. The principles of forward treatment were rediscovered during the North Africa campaign in 1943. Advised by the psychiatrist Frederick Hanson, Omar N.