Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment—whether through hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion—concentrated on turning debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed for disability compensation amid the republic’s political crises and economic upheavals.
Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry’s continual skepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right’s celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations.
