Making Sense of War Neurosis in Yugoslavia

Abstract

Despite the presence of shell-shocked men in postwar societies, there was a tendency to conceal their existence by not recognizing the reality of their wounds. This chapter examines the sociological and cultural framework of Yugoslavian mental medicine, a national context that has not yet been studied by historians. While war neurotics are largely absent from military psychiatric discourse on the war, mentally traumatized men did finally begin to appear in 1920s medical journals when they served a purpose in nationalist debates, particularly in the wake of the Balkan Wars, where debates over Serbian national values began to see the appropriation of traumatized men as tools in social and political battles over identity, victimhood and history.