Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In articles that appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969 and 1971, three army psychiatrists boasted that the policy of embedding psychiatrists in Vietnam’s combat units had been a wonderful success. And so the army’s statistics seemed to show. Peter Bourne, who headed the army’s psychiatric research team, announced that henceforth “psychiatric casualties need never again become a major cause of attrition in the United States military in a combat zone.” It was an assertion that provoked fury among many of those who had been sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Soon enough, that anger had tangible consequences of a profound sort.          Bourne was not the first psychiatrist to claim that his profession had the capacity to ward off the effects of war on the troops. As entry into the Second World War loomed, American psychiatry mobilized. It persuaded Washington that if it wanted to avoid the epidemic of shell-shock that had disabled so many soldiers in the First World War, the government should allow it to screen out the psychiatrically vulnerable. In that way, the damage to morale and to the army’s ability to fight could be avoided, as could the waste of resources involved in training soldiers incapable of enduring combat.           One and three quarter million potential recruits were rejected on psychiatric grounds. It was a triumph of science and forward planning. Except that once combat began, it swiftly became apparent once again that modern industrialized warfare was not ideally suited to the maintenance of mental health. Placed under sufficiently appalling stress, the soldiers of the greatest generation broke down between two and three times as often as those who had fought in the First World War. At war’s end, fifty thousand veterans, not all of whom had actually faced combat, languished in mental hospitals, and another half a million received pensions for psychiatric disabilities. Trauma and psychological stress, it seemed, could cause even the most apparently stable individuals to break down, to become maddened with fear, disgust, and horror.          The traumatic effects of modern military conflict had, in fact, surfaced many decades before even the mass slaughter and maiming that marked the First World War. In the aftermath of America’s Civil War, the newly emerging subspecialty of neurology expected that much of its practice would consist of treating soldiers with obvious wounds of the brain and the nervous system. But such casualties were far outnumbered by veterans who displayed no obvious physical pathology, but who insisted that they were ill and incapacitated. By the end of the war, eight percent of the Union army alone, some 175,000 men, were found to be suffering from “nostalgia” (usually a synonym for depression or panic), or from a variety of “nervous” complaints extending all the way to outright insanity.          Nobody thought to suggest that these men suffered from trauma, because in those years the word retained its original meaning. Derived from the ancient Greek word Τpαúμα, it had entered the English language in the late seventeenth century, and was used to refer to physical wounds. It was derived from other words meaning twisting, bruising, piercing, and the like. Its extension to encompass emotional wounds would not occur till the late 1880s, when the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and then Sigmund Freud began to employ it in a more extended sense to mean psychological responses to deeply distressing events, and to suggest that the origins of the neuroses lay in shattering emotional disturbances. Even in contemporary medicine, of course, the original meaning persists in the designation of certain hospitals as “trauma centers,” that is, places that treat physical injuries of sudden onset and severity that require immediate interventions to save live and limb. Though the psychiatric casualties of the two World Wars gave greater cultural salience to the notion of psychological trauma, the word’s primary reference to physical injury still dominated. For example, when the American Psychiatric Association published the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952, psychological trauma was entirely absent from its pages. The only mentions of trauma referred injuries caused by force or by seizures that were experienced by patients treated with electroshock.          If the