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We have here brought together certain cases or groups of cases in which the event giving rise to the illness is in the first place the atmosphere of total war which reigns in Algeria. Case No. 1: The murder by two young Algerians, thirteen and fourteen years old respectively, of their European playmate.
We had been asked to give expert medical advice in a legal matter. Two young Algerians thirteen and fourteen years old, pupils in a primary school, were accused of having killed one of their European schoolmates. They admitted having done it. The crime was reconstructed, and photos were added to the record. Here one of the children could be seen holding the victim while the other struck at him with a knife. The little defendants did not go back on their declarations. We had long conversations with them. We here reproduce the most characteristic of their remarks:
a) The boy thirteen years old:
"We weren't a bit cross with him. Every Thursday we used to go and play with catapults together, on the hill above the village. He was a good friend of ours. He usn't to go to school any more because he wanted to be a mason like his father. One day we decided to kill him, because
**With these observations we find ourselves in the presence of a coherent system which leaves nothing intact. The executioner who loves birds and enjoys the peace of listening to a symphony or a sonata is simply one stage in the process. Further on in it we may well find a whole existence which enters into complete and absolute sadism.
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the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can't kill big people. But we could kill ones like him, because he was the same age as us. We didn't know how to kill him. We wanted to throw him into a ditch, but he'd only have been hurt. So we got the knife from home and we killed him."
"But why did you pick on him?"
"Because he used to play with us. Another boy wouldn't have gone up the hill with us." "And yet you were pals?"
"Well then, why do they want to kill us? His father is in the militia and he said we ought to have our throats cut."
"But he didn't say anything to you?" "Him? No."
"You know he is dead now." "Yes."
"What does being dead mean?"
"When it's all finished, you go to heaven." "Was it you that killed him?"
"Yes."
"Does having killed somebody worry you?" "No, since they want to kill us, so..."
"Do you mind being in prison?""No." b) The boy fourteen years old:
This young defendant was in marked contrast to his schoolfellow. He was already almost a man, and an adult in his muscular control, his appearance, and the content of his replies. He did not deny having killed either. Why had he killed? He did not reply to the question but asked me had I ever seen a European in prison. Had there ever been a European arrested and sent to prison after the murder of an Algerian? I replied that in fact I had never seen any Europeans in prison.
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"And yet there are Algerians killed every day, aren't there?" "Yes."
"So why are only Algerians found in the prisons? Can you explain that to me?" "No. But tell me why you killed this boy who was your friend."
"I'll tell you why. You've heard tell of the Rivet business?" *
"Yes."
"Two of my family were killed then. At home, they said that the French had sworn to kill us all, one after the other. And did they arrest a single Frenchman for all those Algerians who were killed?"
"I don't know."
"Well, nobody at all was arrested. I wanted to take to the mountains, but I was too young. So X--and I said we'd kill a European."
"Why?"
"In your opinion, what should we have done?"
"I don't know. But you are a child and what is happening concerns grown-up people." "But they kill children too..."
"That is no reason for killing your friend."
"Well, kill him I did. Now you can do what you like."
"Had your friend done anything to harm you?" "Not a thing."
"Well?"
"Well, there you are..."
Case No. 2: Accusatory delirium and suicidal conduct dis-
*Rivet is a village which since a certain day in the year 1956 has become celebrated in the region around Algiers. For on that evening the village was invaded by the militia who dragged forty men from their beds and afterward murdered them.
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guised as "terrorist activity" in a young Algerian twenty. two years old.
This patient was sent to our hospital by the French judicial authorities. This measure was taken after medical and legal advice given by French psychiatrists practicing in Algeria.
The patient was an emaciated man in a complete state of aberration. His body was covered with bruises and two fractures of the jaw made all absorption of nourishment impossible. Thus for more than two weeks the patient was fed by various injections.
After two weeks, the blank in his thoughts receded; we were able to establish contact and we managed to re. construct the dramatic history of this young man.
During his youth he went in for scouting with unusual enthusiasm. He became one of the main leaders of the Moslem Scout Movement. But when he was nineteen years old he dropped scouting completely in order to have no preoccupation other than his profession. He was a multicopying-machine maker; he studied hard and dreamt of becoming a great specialist in his profession. The first of November, 1954, found him absorbed by strictly professional problems. At the time he showed no interest at all in the national struggle.
Already he no longer frequented the company of his former companions. He defined himself at that time as "completely bent on increasing [his] technical capacity."
However, about the middle of 1955, when spending the evening with his family, he suddenly had the impression that his parents considered him a traitor. After a few days this fleeting impression became blunted but at the back of his mind a certain misgiving persisted, a sort of uneasiness that he did not understand.
On account of this, he decided to eat his meals quickly,
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shrinking from the family circle, and shut himself into his room. He avoided all contacts. It was in these conditions that catastrophe intervened. One day, in the middle of the street at about half-past twelve, he distinctly heard a voice calling him a coward. He turned round, but saw nobody. He quickened his pace, and decided that from then on he would not go to work. He stayed in his room and did not eat any dinner. During the night the crisis came on. For three hours he heard all sorts of insults coming from out of the night and resounding in his head: "Traitor, traitor, coward...all your brothers who are dying,... traitor, traitor..."
He was seized with indescribable anxiety: "For eighteen hours my heart beat at the rhythm of 130 pulsations to the minute. I thought I was going to die."
From that time on, the patient could no longer swallow a bite. He wasted away almost visibly; he shut himself up in complete darkness, and refused to open the door to his parents. Around the third day he took refuge in prayer. He stayed kneeling, he told me, from seventeen to eighteen hours on end each day. On the fourth day, acting on impulse "like a madman," with "a beard that was also enough to make [him] be taken for a madman," wearing neither coat nor tie, he went out into the town. Once in the street, he did not know where to go; but he started walking, and at the end of some time he found himself in the European town. His physical appearance (he looked like a European) seemed then to safeguard him against being stopped and questioned by the police patrols.
As a contrast to this, beside him Algerian men and women were arrested, maltreated, insulted, and searched. Paradoxically, he had no papers on him. This uncalled-for consideration toward him on the part of the enemy patrols confirmed his delusion that "everybody knew he was with
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the French. Even the soldiers had their orders; they left him alone."
In addition, the glances of the arrested Algerians, who were waiting to be searched with their hands behind their necks, seemed to him to be full of contempt. The prey of overwhelming agitation, he moved away, striding rapidly. It was at this moment that he happened to walk in front of the building which was the French Staff Headquarters. In the gateway stood several soldiers armed with machine-guns. He went toward the soldiers, threw himself upon one of them and tried to snatch his machine-gun, shouting "I am an Algerian."
He was quickly overcome and was brought to the police, where they insisted on making him confess the names of his "superiors" and the different members of the network to which he (supposedly) belonged. After some days the police and the soldiers realized that they were dealing with a sick man. An expert opinion was sought which concluded that he was suffering from mental disorders and that he should be sent to the hospital. "All I wanted to do," he said, "was to die. Even at the police barracks I thought and hoped that after they'd tortured me they would kill me. I was glad to be struck, for that showed me
that they considered that I too was their enemy. I could no longer go on hearing those accusing voices, without doing something. I am not a coward. I am not a woman. I am not a traitor." *
Case No. 3: Neurotic attitude of a young Frenchwoman whose father, a highly placed civil servant, was killed in an ambush.
This girl, twenty-one years old, a student, came to con-
*During the year 1955, cases of this type were very numerous in Algeria. Unfortunately not all the patients had the good fortune to be sent to a hospital.
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sult me about certain minor symptoms of anxiety complex which interfered with her studies and with her social relationships. Her hands were constantly moist and at times presented very worrying symptoms when sweat "flowed all over her hands." Constrictions of the chest accompanied by nocturnal headaches. Bit her nails. But the thing that was most apparent was above all the over-easy contact, obviously too rapid, while a severe anxiety could be dearly sensed underlying the facile approach. The death of her father, though judging from the date fairly recent, was mentioned by the patient with such lightheartedness that we quickly directed our investigations toward her relations with her father. The account which she gave us was clear, completely lucid, with a lucidity which touched on insensibility and later revealed, precisely by its rationalism, this girl's uneasiness and the nature and origin of her conflict.
My father was highly placed in the civil service. He was responsible for a very large rural area. As soon as the troubles started, he threw himself into the Algerian manhunt with frenzied rage. Sometimes it happened that he would eat nothing at all, and not even sleep, he was in such a state of excitement over putting down the rebellion. I saw without being able to do anything about it the slow metamorphosis of my father. Finally, I decided not to go to see him any more and to stay in town. The fact was that every time I went home I spent entire nights awake, for screams used to rise up to my room from down below; in the cellar and in the unused rooms of the house Algerians were being tortured so as to obtain information. You have no idea how terrible it is to hear screaming all night like that. Sometimes I used to wonder how it was that a human being was able to bear hearing those screams of pain--quite apart from the actual torture. And so it went on. Finally, I didn't ever go home. The rare times that my father came to see me in town I wasn't able to look him in the face without being terribly frightened
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and embarrassed. I found it increasingly difficult to force myself to kiss him.
For you must understand that I had lived a long time in the village. I knew almost all the families that lived there. The Algerian boys of my age and I had played together when we were small. Every time I went home my father told me that fresh people had been arrested. In the end I didn't dare walk in the street any more, I was so sure of meeting hatred everywhere. In my heart I knew that those Algerians were right. If I were an Algerian girl, I'd be in the Maquis.
One day, however, she received a telegram which announced that her father was seriously injured. She went to the hospital and found her father in a coma. Shortly afterward he died. He had been wounded while on a reconnoitering expedition with a military detachment; the patrol fell into an ambush laid by the Algerian National Army. "The funeral sickened me," she said.
All those officials who came to weep over the death of my father whose "high moral qualities conquered the native population" disgusted me. Everyone knew that it was false. There wasn't a single person who didn't know that my father had the whip hand of all the interrogation centers in the whole region. Everyone knew that the number of deaths under torture reached ten a day, and there they came to tell their lies about my father's devotion, his self-sacrifice, his love for his country, and so on. I ought to say that now such words have no meaning for me, or at any rate hardly any. I went back to the town directly afterward, and I avoided all the authorities. They offered me an allowance but I refused it. I don't want their money. It is the price of the blood spilt by my father. I don't want any of it. I am going to work.
Case No. 4: Behavior disturbances in young Algerians under ten.
These children were refugees, the children of fighting men or of civilians killed by the French. They were sent to various different centers in Tunisia and Morocco. These children were sent to school, and games and outings were
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organized for them. They were examined regularly by doctors; that is how we came to have occasion to see some of them.
A. In each of these different children there exists a very marked love for parental images. Everything which resembles a father or a mother is sought out with the greatest tenacity and jealously guarded.
B. Generally speaking, they all have a noise phobia which is very noticeable. These children are very much affected when they are scolded. They have a great thirst for peace and for affection.
C. Many of them suffer from sleeplessness and also from sleepwalking.
D. Periodical enuresis.
E. Sadistic tendencies. A game that is often played is to stretch a sheet of paper and feverishly poke holes in it. All their pencils are chewed and their nails bitten with distressing regularity. They quarrel frequently among themselves despite a deep fundamental affection.
Case No. 5: Puerperal psychoses among the refugees.
The name puerperal psychoses is given to mental disorders which occur in women around childbirth. Such disorders may appear immediately before or some weeks after giving birth. The determinism of such illnesses is very complex; but it is considered that the principal causes are the upsetting of the functioning of the endocrine glands and the existence of an "affective shock." The latter heading, though vague, covers what most people refer to as "violent emotion."
On the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers there are to be found something like 300,000 refugees since the decision of the French government to practice their burnt earth policy over hundreds of kilometers. The destitution in which they exist is well known.
International Red Cross committees have repeatedly paid visits to these places and
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after having observed the extreme poverty and precariousness of living conditions they have recommended increased aid to these refugees from international organizations. It was thus only to be expected, considering the undernourishment which is rife in these camps, that pregnant women there should show particular propensities for the development of puerperal psychoses.
The atmosphere of permanent insecurity in which the refugees exist is kept up by frequent invasions of French troops, applying "the right of following and pursuit," bombardments from the air, machine-gunnings--it is well known that no further attention is now paid to bombardments of Moroccan and Tunisian territories by the French army, of which Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef, the martyred village in Tunisia, was the most appalling-- together with the break-up of homes which is a consequence of the conditions of the evacuation. To tell the truth there are very few Algerian women who give birth in such conditions who do not suffer from mental disorders.
These disorders take various forms. Sometimes they are visible as states of agitation which sometimes turn into rages; sometimes deep depression and tonic immobility with many attempted suicides; or sometimes finally anxiety states with tears, lamentations, and appeals for mercy. In the same way the form which the delusions take are many and divers. We may find a delusion of persecution against the French who want to kill the new-born infant or the child not yet born; or else the mother may have the impression of imminent death, in which the mothers implore invisible executioners to spare their child.
Here once more we must point out that the fundamental nature of these problems is not cleared up by the regression and soothing of the disorders. The circumstances of the cured patients maintains and feeds these pathological kinks.
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