Men throwing off their uniforms and running around naked, others talking like children, crying and wailing, while others tremble in total silence, or who are delirious with fear of the devil and of being possessed by demons. These are also the wounds of war, of all wars. A new study carried out by Professor Vinzia Fiorino, a historian at the University of Pisa, published in the journal “Modern Italy” of Cambridge University Press returns to the subject of trauma and psychological disorders in Italian soldiers (but the phenomenon is common to all the countries involved) after the First World War.
It starts with the numbers, which are huge: in Italy alone, soldiers suffering from mental disorders were around 40.000 and according to some estimates even more. An emergency that led in January 1918, after the defeat at Caporetto in 1917, to the establishment of a First Collection Centre in Reggio Emilia to try to manage (and limit) the flow of soldiers arriving from the front to be sent to the various psychiatric hospitals throughout the country.
“Initially, doctors do not consider the war to be the cause of the various disorders but rather a congenital factor such as a predisposition or as heredity, or even just as a figment of their imagination ,” explains Vinzia Fiorino, “ making life in psychiatric hospitals and collection centres very difficult, worse than being at the front, for example sufferers are subjected to electric shock or the application of electricity even to their private parts, adding horror to horror”.
Starting from the vast existing historiography, Fiorino’s essay begins by studying the medical records of patients admitted to different psychiatric hospitals, including Rome, Volterra and Trieste, and highlights a number of hitherto under-examined disorders and behaviours, such as regression to childhood, undressing and running (sometimes after defecating on their discarded uniforms), as well as particular forms of hysterical syndrome, which until then had been considered a predominantly female problem. Professor Fiorino interprets these behaviours in the light of major cultural changes taking place: the rhetoric of the war hero on the one hand, and the massification of the man-soldier inserted into large collective bodies, such as the first conscript armies on the other.
Alpini during the Great War (source: Wikipedia)
"The discipline to which the soldiers were subjected had in some way already “infantilised” the men by depriving them of autonomy and the possibility of making decisions, the regression to childhood reproduces the hierarchical model of total obedience to military life,” explains Vinzia Fiorino. “The depersonalisation of the man-soldier, which has nothing to do with the idea of the lone hero, also undermines the model of masculinity, and from this enormous crucible emerges a desire to create a new identity, even in contempt for the old one, hence the undressing and fleeing naked.
In this way, trauma and psychological disorders become an indicator to analyse the transition from the figure of the soldier-hero to that of the soldier-mass in a circuit, in which female stereotypes also come into play to describe a masculinity in crisis and the emergence of the mass as a new political subject.