Shifting from nervous to normal through love machines: Battle exhaustion, military psychiatrists and emotionally traumatized soldiers in World War II

At the onset of World War II, both military and civilian psychiatrists were keen on designating internal factors, such as, cowardice, an overbearing mother, or a henpecked father as determinants of war neuroses. By the end of the war, the notion that anyone could break down under extreme pressure displaced most other explanations of war neuroses. In this paper, using feminist emotional geographies as a framework, I look at how love contributed to this shift. I read three types of texts created through the practices engaged by military psychiatrists in the Canadian Army during World War II at three different sites—in units treating only exhaustion, at a convalescent depot, and at a field dressing station. These texts as both the outcome and record of Canadian military psychiatric practices in World War II form the basis upon which I read how love as a machine (a lá Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) passes through both psychiatry and the military as it contributes to enacting a reality in practice (a lá Annemarie Mol).