War Wounds 235 historical connection with the war and shell shock and consider how Hall aroused her contemporary readers’ affective relation to this history in an attempt to condition the moral evaluation of Stephen’s invert narrative The Well of Loneliness endeavors to render Stephen’s invert identity legible and affectively accessible to a heterosexual post–Great War audience by staging it within what Lauren Berlant has termed a National Symbolic11 that binds reader, author and protagonist together in a shared national history that includes the war, shell shock, and psychoanalysis Shell Shock and the Cultural Emergence of Psychoanalysis in Britain Among its many radical disruptions of cultural experience, World War I catalyzed a revolution in psychology when traditional psychiatric medicine, which relied upon theories of inherited insanity and organic etiologies, failed to accommodate the widespread psychological casualties of war.12 Reflecting upon the impact of shell shock, historian Martin Stone notes, “The monolithic theory of hereditary degeneration upon which Victorian psychiatry had based its social and scientific vision was significantly dented as young men of respectable and proven character were reduced to mental wrecks after a few months in the trenches.”13 Diagnoses of hereditary weakness and organic damage persisted, but proved inadequate and ideologically undesirable when applied to the psychic disorders of war, while the relatively new psychoanalytic doctrines of Freud and his British followers offered one of the only alternatives for understanding and treating the shell-shocked soldier Avoiding Freud’s connection between sexual life and the neuroses, British doctors selectively adapted Freudian concepts in their attempts to (ad)dress the psychic wounds of war The respected and influential British shell shock doctor, W H R Rivers, insisted that selective Freudianism proved “of direct practical use in diagnosis and treatment” of cases of mental disturbance presented by the war and offered a “working hypothesis to stimulate inquiry and help us in our practice while we are groping our way towards the truth concerning the nature of mental disorder.”14 Subsequently, what emerged during the war from shell shock doctors such as Rivers was an eclectic “depth psychology” that incorporated such psychoanalytic concepts as mental trauma and unconscious psychical con-