The Structure of Morale

J. T. MacCurdy

Sep 2018 · Pickle Partners Publishing

About this ebook

During World War I, when Captain J. T. MacCurdy, a Canadian psychiatrist and Cornell University lecturer, was despatched on a special mission to Britain, he undertook one of the earliest studies of war neuroses. The new factor was the availability of high explosives following Nobel’s discovery of dynamite in 1867 (nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth) and developments thereof such as trinitrotoluene (TNT) and picric acid. High explosives were a boon to the mining and the civil engineer but inflicted terrible injuries on combatants. Shell shock—or, as we would now call it, post-traumatic stress disorder—resulted from extreme experiences on the battlefield, injury, concussion, being buried alive or simply the scale of the slaughter.

This book, which was first published in 1943, contains the text of lectures delivered by Dr. J. T. MacCurdy to groups of officers from the army and the auxiliary women’s services early in WWII. MacCurdy, continuing on from his findings during WWI, discusses the nature of fear, the national factors at play in the creation and sustainability of morale with reference to the Allied and Axis powers, and the significance of psychological factors in practice in an organized community.

“This intelligent, objective analysis of the nature of the psychological factor in war was intended for the British soldier, but its interest and application are universal.”—Foreign Affairs

About the author

John Thomson MacCurdy (1886-1947) was a renowned Canadian psychiatrist and University lecturer at Cornell from 1913-1922 and Cambridge from 1923-1947.

Born in Toronto, Canada, he studied biology at the University of Toronto, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1906. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1911 and was elected to a Fellowship in Pathology at Johns Hopkins. He pursued research in neuropathology in Germany and worked for a time in Alzheimer’s laboratory in Munich. In 1913 he was appointed Lecturer in Medical Psychology at Cornell and Assistant to Dr. August Hoch at the Psychiatric Institute of New York. He was a founder of the American Psychoanalytic Association, of which he became President in 1922.

In 1917, as America entered WWI, MacCurdy, now with the rank of Captain, was despatched on a special mission to England to investigate the problems which were about to confront psychiatrists in the American Expeditionary Forces. Working within neurology and psychiatry in the British Army, he learnt about many new psychological conditions in the troops, not seen in previous wars fought by British forces—in particular shell shock, or what is today referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. He reported his findings in his book, War Neuroses, in 1918, which followed his 1917 work, The Psychology of War, which analysed the traits that lead to wars.

MacCurdy returned to the U.S. in 1919 and continued to practise as a psychiatrist and his work with Hoch on manic-depressive psychoses, publishing his work in 1920 as The Prognosis of Involutional Melancholia. He became a lecturer in psychopathology at Cambridge University in 1923 and continued to write books, including Problems in Dynamic Psychology (1923) and The Psychology of Emotion (1925). In 1926 he was appointed to the position of Psychological Consultant to the Royal Air Force.

MacCurdy continued to write books during his time in Cambridge, including Problems in Dynamic Psychology: A Critique of Psychoanalysis and Suggested Formulations (1922), The Structure of Emotion, Morbid And Normal (1925), Common Principles in Psychology and Physiology (1928), Mind and Money: A Psychologist Looks at the Crisis (1932), and The Structure of Morale (1943).

He died in 1947.