Social History of Medicine Vol. 00, No. 0 pp.

1–20

‘My Husband . . . is an Authentic Psychopath’:

Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the

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Francoist Regime
Stephanie Wright *

Summary. This article seeks to broaden current understandings of war psychiatry, particularly
within authoritarian contexts, through its focus on mental illness in the Francoist army during and
after the Spanish Civil war of 1936–39. More specifically, this research points to the coexistence of
multiple discourses of psychological disturbance in Francoist Spain. Francoist psychiatrists were re-
luctant to acknowledge the psychological fallout of the Spanish Civil War on those soldiers who
had helped to ensure the Nationalist victory, and the regime’s legislation disenfranchised those
who did not boast lengthy military careers. Yet in the absence of an official language of war
trauma, veterans and their families found other ways to express themselves, often appropriating
the regime’s own political and psychiatric discourse. Such popular understandings of Civil War
trauma served an important function for Spaniards seeking to negotiate the many contradictions of
life under the Francoist regime.
Keywords: war psychiatry; veterans; Francoism; Spain; trauma

In June 1959, Dolores Hernández penned a strongly worded letter to Dr Juan Antonio
Vallejo-Nágera of the psychiatric asylum in Leganés, just outside of Madrid.1 The note per-
tained to Dolores’ husband, Enrique, interned in the asylum at that time, who Vallejo
sought to discharge back into her care. Dolores, who met and married her husband during
his military service on the Francoist side during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, main-
tained that his illness began during the conflict, and Enrique’s sister concurred that he had
seemed ‘normal’ until the outbreak of hostilities. Tired of his erratic behaviour, especially
the physical abuse she suffered at his hands, Dolores explained to Vallejo that her husband
was ‘an authentic psychopath’, ‘truly incurable’, and that if he was sent home against her
wishes, she would ‘make use of the legislation which supports my refusal’. Dolores and
Enrique’s failed marriage could be considered a delayed casualty of the Civil War and the
psychological consequences for those who fought in it. Their fraught family saga not only
sheds light on the existence of mentally ill Francoist veterans in post-war Spain but also on
*Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, 26 Russell Square, Room B33,
London WC1B 5DQ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Stephanie Wright is a historian of modern Spain with broader interests in the histories of disability, gender and
psychiatry. She completed her PhD on the Francoist war disabled of the Spanish Civil War at the University of
Sheffield in 2018 and is now a Wellcome postdoctoral fellow on the SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical
Encounters) project at Birkbeck College, London.

1
Archivo Histórico del Instituto Psiquiátrico Servicios de Spanish data protection legislation. Juan Antonio was
Salud Mental José Germain (henceforth IPJG), historia the son of the infamous Antonio Vallejo-Nágera,
clı́nica, XXSI01566. Please note that the names of Head of Psychiatric services of the Nationalist army
patients and their families have been anonymised in during the Spanish Civil War.
order to protect their identities, in accordance with

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
doi:10.1093/shm/hkaa072
2 Stephanie Wright

the complex, multi-layered discourses surrounding the issue of war trauma in Francoist
Spain. Dolores’ recourse to the language of psychopathy drew on official psychiatric dis-
courses that dismissed the existence of ‘war neurosis’. But Dolores also subverted these
same discourses by accommodating the notion that Franco’s foot soldiers could be psycho-

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logically scarred by their very involvement in the ‘glorious’, Nationalist ‘Crusade’.
In comparison to the rich literature on ‘shell shock’ and ‘war neurosis’ experienced by
combatants in the First World War, very little has been written on the psychiatric
aftermaths of soldiering in the Spanish Civil War.2 The deeply fratricidal Spanish Civil War
witnessed the deaths of around 200,000 soldiers, while an estimated 80,000 were left
permanently maimed.3 In addition, the psychological trauma of those who suffered
repression at the hands of the Nationalists during the Civil War, and Franco’s forces of
law and order in its aftermath, is well-documented and continues to be felt by those
Spaniards who still search, some 80 years on, for the hastily buried remains of their long-
dead loved ones.4 To date, historical scholarship on modern Spain has reflected this need
to commemorate the Republic and Republicans, both as victims and protagonists.5
Research on the Nationalist side during the Civil War and subsequent Francoist regime
remains relatively underdeveloped, which goes some way to explaining why there has
thus far been little interest in exploring the issue of war trauma amongst those soldiers
who helped Franco to secure his victory in the Civil War.
Historians of modern Britain have highlighted the close relationship between historical
memory and historical scholarship on war trauma. A general consensus that regarded
(and regards) the Great War as an unparalleled ‘collective trauma’ has facilitated discus-
sions about the psychological impact of the war for those who fought in it.6 In Spain, the
Civil War remains a highly contentious issue, in no small part a result of the longevity of
the Francoist dictatorship, which lasted until 1975 and whose crimes have never been
subject to judicial scrutiny.7 As a result, Franco’s Civil War ‘lunatics’ (dementes)—to use the

2 4
Paloma Aguilar has briefly explored the psychological On attempts by the descendants of murdered
trauma experienced by Republican veterans, in Republicans to uncover the mortal remains of their
Paloma Aguilar, ‘Agents of Memory: Spanish Civil relatives, see Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory,
War Veterans and Disabled Soldiers’ in J. Winter and Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War
E. Sivan, eds, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth (Walnut Creek, Calif: Left Coast Press, 2011). Spain’s
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory
1999), 84–103. More scholarship has been published hosts a map of Civil War graves and their exhumation
on academic psychiatric discussions of ‘war neurosis’ status here: https://memoriahistorica.org.es/mapa-de-
during the Civil War. See, for example, Olga la-verguenza/ [last visited 5 September 2019].
5
Villasante, ‘“War Neurosis” During the Spanish Civil Some classic examples of the extensive scholarship on
War (1936–39)’, History of Psychiatry, 2010, 84, 424– the Republic and its supporters include Santos Juliá,
35; Paloma Vázquez de la Torre and Raquel Tierno, ed., Vı́ctimas de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Temas de
‘La literatura psiquiátrica durante la guerra civil espa- Hoy, 1999); Julián Casanova, ed., Morir, Matar,
ola (1936–1939): Archivos de Neurobiologı́a, Revista Sobrevivir: La Violencia en la Dictadura de Franco
de Sanidad de Guerra y Revistas Espan ~ola de (Barcelona: Crı́tica, 2002); Helen Graham, The
Medicina y Cirugı́a’, in R. Campos, O. Villasante and Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge:
R. Huertas, eds, De la ‘Edad de Plata’ al exilio: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6
Construcción y ‘Reconstrucción’ de la Psiquiatrı́a See, for example, Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell
Espan ~ola (Madrid: Frenia, 2007), 239–58. Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain, 1914–1930
3
Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and (London: Continuum, 2011), 8–9.
7
Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: An attempt by the judge Baltazar Garzón to use inter-
Harper Press, 2012), xi; Aguilar, ‘Agents of Memory’, national law to try the Francoist government for
86. crimes against humanity led to the indictment and
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 3

vocabulary of the time—do not fit neatly into the ‘victor/vanquished’ dichotomy, which con-
tinues to frame discussions of the conflict and ensuing dictatorship. As soldiers who helped
to secure the Nationalist victory in 1939, the dementes were quite literally the victors of the
Civil War and therefore of little interest to those seeking to document the injustices experi-

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enced by vanquished Republicans. At the same time, mentally ill veterans were inconvenient
to the regime and its supporters, given that they belied prevailing masculine norms, as well
as political discourse that depicted the Civil War as a regenerative, health-bringing
‘Crusade’.8 As a result, military psychiatric casualties on the Nationalist side were not dis-
cussed in the press or granted much attention beyond elite academic psychiatric circles.
Nonetheless, a study of war neurosis in the Spanish Civil War has the potential to
broaden current understandings of mental illness during and after conflict, particularly
within a context of military dictatorship. Most Spanish psychiatrists maintained that inci-
dences of mental illness had been infrequent on the Nationalist side.9 If we are to take
such assurances at face value, why did the mental health crisis that racked participants of
the First World War apparently fail to manifest itself in the Spanish Civil War, noted for
its ferocity on and off the battlefield?10 Yet, despite the stated absence of war trauma,
legislation was passed by the Francoist regime in 1944 to support ‘lunatics’ who had
served in the Francoist army. What was the purpose of such legislation, if not to support
traumatised Civil War veterans? And how did Spain’s prevailing socio-political context—
particularly National Catholic conceptualisations of the war as ‘Crusade’—affect the
treatment and support of those who did become mentally ill as a result of their participa-
tion in the conflict? This article seeks to address these questions, illustrating the coexis-
tence of multiple discourses of trauma in Spain during the Civil War and beyond.11 In the
absence of an official language of war trauma, veterans and their families often fell back
on the regime’s own rhetoric and psychiatric discourse. Despite the tendency of Francoist
psychiatrists to dismiss the issue of ‘war neurosis’, popular understandings of psychologi-
cal trauma in the Civil War served an important function for Spaniards seeking to negoti-
ate the many contradictions of life under the Francoist regime. In this sense, this article
contributes to existing debates on the constructed nature of trauma throughout history,
illustrating how Spain’s context of military dictatorship adapted broader international
emphasis on the constitutional origins of war neurosis while fostering a more localised
language of psychological trauma shaped by the context of Civil War.12

suspension of Garzón in 2010. See, for example, Violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la Dictadura
Inmaculada Sanz, ‘Controversial Spanish judge sus- Franquista (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2008).
11
pended over war probe’, Reuters, 14 May 2010. The coexistence of multiple discourses of psychologi-
8
Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the cal trauma has also been noted in Dutch cases of sex-
Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 ual violence by Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Trauma, Body and
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 58– Mind: Forensic Medicine in Nineteenth-Century
61. Dutch Rape Cases’, Journal of the History of
9
Villasante, ‘War Neurosis’, 426. Sexuality, 2013, 22, 85–104.
10 12
See, for example, Preston, Spanish Holocaust; Sandie On the constructed nature of the trauma paradigm
Holguı́n, ‘How did the Spanish Civil War End? . . . Not throughout history, see Ruth Ley, Trauma: A
so well’, American Historical Review, 2015, 120, Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1767–83, 1773–74; Francisco Moreno, ‘La represión 2000); Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions:
en la posguerra’ in Juliá, ed., Vı́ctimas de la Guerra Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton,
Civil, 277–406; Javier Rodrigo, Hasta la Raiz: NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Didier Fassin
and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An
4 Stephanie Wright

This article will also enable a re-evaluation of the very meaning of being a ‘veteran’ in
Francoist Spain. As I will show, under the military regime, a man’s ‘veteran’ status was
not solely determined by his military service to the Francoist side in the Civil War but
rather was contingent on his long-term positioning within broader social, military, gender

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and health hierarchies. Disparities in veterans’ experiences were in part fuelled by ambi-
guities in psychiatric thought and practice, which allowed for the simultaneous neglect
of those deemed unworthy and the protection of those deemed worthy. Such categories
were usually determined by an individual’s standing within the military establishment as
well as their conformity with the regime’s broader cultural norms. Consequently, and
somewhat ironically, those who benefitted the most from Francoist military mental
health legislation were often those whose illnesses did not originate during the Civil War.
Previous scholarship has highlighted the importance of Civil War loyalties in determin-
ing an individual’s place within Francoism’s ‘national community’, in which former sup-
porters of the Republic were excluded, while those who had supported the Nationalist
side during the Civil War, particularly as soldiers, were able to reap the rewards of their
wartime sacrifices.13 Scholars such as Ángel Alcalde and Miguel Angel del Arco Blanco
have presented particularly convincing cases for the latter, illustrating, for example, the
clear over-representation of Francoist veterans in positions of local and national power
under the dictatorship.14 While this was true for some—particularly those tied to the mili-
tary establishment—the regime was utterly neglectful when it came to taking care of sol-
diers whose participation in the war stripped them of their mental health. This reality
enables us to nuance the ‘victor/vanquished’ dichotomy and to broaden our understand-
ing of what Claudio Hernández Burgos and Carlos Fuertes Mun ~oz have recently referred
to as the ‘grey zones’ and ‘ordinary victors’ of Francoist society.15 While the dementes
were relatively privileged in the sense that they did not face the physical and social
repression inflicted on former Republicans, their plight in the years following the war
belies the notion that Civil War service within the Francoist army was enough to ensure
an adequate standard of living in the post-war period. Indeed, in Francoist Spain, veteran

Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, in politics and who wished merely to maintain a
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). sense of personal ‘normality’ under the dictatorship.
13
See, for example, Angela Cenarro, La Sonrisa de Fuertes develops this idea further through an explo-
Falange: Auxilio Social en la Guerra Civil y en la ration of who he refers to as the ‘ordinary victors’,
Posguerra (Barcelona: Crı́tica, 2006); Peter Anderson, those ‘ordinary’ individuals who supported the 1936
The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity, coup d’état and 1939 Francoist victory. Despite their
1939–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2010); Conxita initial support, many ‘ordinary victors’ became in-
Mir, ‘Justicia Civil y Control Moral de la Población creasingly disillusioned with the regime over time.
Marginal en el Franquismo de Posguerra’, Historia Claudio Hernández Burgos, Franquismo a Ras de
Social, 2000, 37, 53–72. Suelo: Zonas Grises, Apoyos Sociales y Actitudes
14
Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘“Hombres Nuevos”. durante la Dictadura (1936–1976) (Granada: Editorial
El Personal Polı́tico del Primer Franquismo en el Universidad de Granada, 2013); Claudio Hernández
Mundo Rural del Sureste Espan ~ol (1936–1951)’, Burgos, ‘The Triumph of “Normality,” Social
Ayer, 2007, 65, 237–67; Ángel Alcalde, Los Attitudes, Popular Opinion and the Construction of
Excombatientes Franquistas: La Cultura de Guerra del the Franco Regime in Post-War Rural Spain (1936–
Fascismo Espan ~ol y la Delegación Nacional de 1952)’, European History Quarterly, 2016, 46, 291–
Excombatientes (1936–1965) (Zaragoza: Prensas de 310; Carlos Fuertes Mun ~oz, Viviendo en Dictadura:
la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2014). La Evolución de las Actitudes Sociales Hacia el
15
Hernández uses the term ‘grey zones’ to describe the Franquismo (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2017).
vast majority of Spaniards who were not implicated
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 5

privilege was contingent on the intersection of various identity markers—such as class

and whether an individual’s wounds were physical or psychological in nature—rather
than the fact of Civil War service in itself. In this sense, not only did the regime brutally
repress its enemies, it also failed many of its own supporters.

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Research for this article was conducted in the military archives in Segovia and the Unit
for the Management of the War Maimed (Unidad Gestión de Mutilados) in Madrid. This
research also draws on psychiatric case files held in the archives of the Conjo sanatorium
in Santiago de Compostela, the Santa Isabel psychiatric hospital in Leganés and the pro-
vincial psychiatric hospital in Oviedo.16 These psychiatric archives were selected due to
the accessibility of their holdings and, combined with the centralised files from the mili-
tary archives outlined above, offer a well-rounded perspective of the experiences of men-
tally ill Francoist veterans in different parts of Spain. The military and psychiatric case files
are extraordinarily rich but remain practically unexplored by historians, in part due to their
complex and patchy nature. The military case files only reveal the histories of those who
applied for state support via the Francoist disabled veterans body, the Honourable Corps
for the Mutilated in the War for the Fatherland (Benemérito Cuerpo de Mutilados de
Guerra por la Patria, BCMGP) and therefore necessarily exclude many veterans who did not
apply, perhaps because they believed themselves to be ineligible, or, indeed, because they
were ignorant to their eligibility. Similarly, the psychiatric archives can only tell us about
those veterans who found themselves interned in the asylum and therefore remain silent
on the experiences of those who were never hospitalised. In this article, the lives of those
who managed their conditions beyond the asylum and BCMGP are glimpsed through the
memoirs and published works of the psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino. This combination
of sources helps to mitigate the limitations of each document type, offering a unique in-
sight into the lives of mentally ill Francoist veterans under the dictatorship.

War Neurosis, Psychiatric Discourse and the Francoist Regime

Spain’s neutrality in the Great War meant that the many publications on ‘shell shock’
and ‘war neurosis’ produced as a result of the conflict had little impact on Spanish
psychiatrists, at least until the outbreak of the Civil War.17 Spanish psychiatry in the early
decades of the twentieth century was strongly influenced by the work of German
psychiatrists Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) and Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964), who
championed the importance of heredity and ‘constitution’ in determining an individual’s
predisposition to mental illness.18 By the outbreak of the Civil War, such understandings
of mental illness had become mainstream in Spain and were accepted by psychiatrists
across the ideological spectrum during the tumultuous 1930s.19 This emphasis on the im-
portance of genetics to mental illness would prove convenient for dealing with mentally

16 18
Though referred to in the Castilian form under the Michael Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry c.1900–1945:
dictatorship, the psychiatric hospital in Santiago is Constitutional Theory, Eugenics, and the Nation’,
now more usually referred to using the Galician spell- Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2004, 81–86, 836–38,
ing ‘Conxo’. 824.
17 19
Villasante, ‘War Neurosis’, 426. Ibid., 835.
6 Stephanie Wright

ill Francoist veterans as it allowed the regime to deny the causal link between psychiatric
pathology and war service.20
Any attempt to establish reliable statistics on the psychological casualties of the
Spanish Civil War is frustrated by the patchy surviving source material and the reality that

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even contemporary psychiatrists struggled to get a handle on the scale of the issue. This
was in large part due to the diagnostic chaos that characterised the psychiatric profession
during and after the war, whereby patients presenting similar symptoms could be given
varying diagnoses.21 Even the Head of Psychiatric Services for the Nationalist Army,
Antonio Vallejo Nágera admitted that it was impossible to establish how many soldiers
were affected by psychological illness in the war. This, he explained, resulted from the in-
ability of psychiatrists to agree on how to classify such individuals, and because many sol-
diers with mild conditions were treated either in civilian hospitals or at home.22
Nonetheless, Vallejo Nágera took care to downplay incidences of mental illness on the
Francoist side, stating that the decision not to open a specialist centre for the treatment
of war neurosis in the Nationalist zone was due to a lack of demand.23 This narrative was
repeated by other Francoist psychiatrists, such as the monarchist Juan José López Ibor.24
Yet there is good cause to question the scientific objectivity of Vallejo Nágera’s conclu-
sions. During the Civil War, he had gladly pledged his psychiatric training to the
Nationalist cause, carrying out experiments of Republican prisoners of war in an attempt
to uncover the ‘biopsychic’ roots of ‘Marxism’.25 Similarly, there is sufficient archival evi-
dence to question Vallejo and López Ibor’s assessment of the rates of mental illness in the
Francoist army. Military records reveal that by 1939, the large numbers of mentally ill sol-
diers had completely overwhelmed the capacity of the military psychiatric clinics.26
Despite similar overcrowding in the civilian sector, the Inspector General for Heath pro-
posed relocating mentally ill soldiers to civilian asylums one month after service personnel
were declared unfit for service. Such attempts to move mentally infirm soldiers to civilian
asylums constituted the first step in disassociating psychiatric patients from their military
service, a process that would continue over the following years and even decades.
Despite such acute overcrowding, psychiatrists refused to acknowledge the existence
of war trauma. Following similar trends in Germany, Vallejo Nágera did not believe that
war caused forms of mental illness different from those occurring in peacetime and

20 24
Ibid., 844; Michael Richards, ‘Morality and Biology in Juan José López Ibor, Neurosis de Guerra: Psicologı́a
the Spanish Civil War: Psychiatrists, Revolution and de Guerra, (Barcelona: Cientı́fico Médica, 1942),
Women Prisoners in Málaga’, Contemporary 120.
25
European History, 2001, 10, 395–421, 421. On Vallejo Nágera and ‘national psychiatry’, see
21
Methodological issues linked to diagnostic heteroge- Michael Richards, ‘Antonio Vallejo Nágera: Heritage,
neity and the sparseness of records are noted by Psychiatry and War’ in M. A. del Arco Blanco and A.
scholars working on military mental illness in a range Quiroga Fernández, eds, Right-Wing Spain in the
of contexts. See, for example, Peter Barham, Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the
Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven and Fatherland, 1914–1945 (London: Continuum, 2012),
London: Yale University Press, 2004), 7; Effie 195–224; Javier Bandrés and Rafael Llavona, ‘La psi-
Karageorgos, ‘Mental Illness, Masculinity, and the cologia en los campos de concentración de Franco’,
Australian Soldier: Military Psychiatry from South Psicothema, 1996, 8, 1–11.
26
Africa to the First World War’, Health and History, Archivo General Militar de Ávila (henceforth
2018, 20, 10–29, 13. AGMAV), C.22205, 7, ‘Expedientes de Sanidad orde-
22
Antonio Vallejo Nágera, Psicosis de Guerra: Estudio nados por la voz “Dementes,”’ Letter from Minister
Clı́nico y Estadı́stico, (Madrid: Morata, 1942), 24, 35. of the Interior to the Minister of National Defence,
23
Vallejo Nágera, Psicosis de guerra, 35. 13 March 1939.
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 7

attributed any increase in mental illness during the Spanish Civil War to a rise in the exter-
nal or ‘exogenous’ causal factors of psychiatric disorders, which triggered psychosis in
those who were already constitutionally predisposed to it.27 Across the battlefield,
Republican psychiatrists generally shared the view that war did not create new kinds of

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mental illness. Republican psychiatrist Gonzalo Rodrı́guez Lafora, for example, argued
that war did not create any new kinds of psychoses, adding that war in fact reduced
admissions to psychiatric institutions, partly due to the fact that many young and as yet
undiagnosed mentally ill persons entered the army.28 Similarly, psychiatrist Dionisio Nieto
denied the fact that ‘war psychosis’ existed at all, instead highlighting how the various
elements that form part of armed conflict, such as danger of death, emotional tension
and fatigue, were all capable of triggering mental disorders but were not exclusive to
war.29
Yet psychiatrists on opposing sides of the conflict did judge mental illness in war
differently. Emilio Mira, Antonio Vallejo Nágera’s counterpart on the Republican side,
was far more willing to normalise mental illness within the armed forces, comparing war
to madness itself. He argued that in war, ‘compulsion, mechanical strength, and even
brutality prevail over persuasion and reason. The same occurs in madness. Consequently
psychiatrists, were they mere professional observers, would be disposed to regard war as
a national psychosis afflicting the collective mind’.30 Mira’s attitude towards war is
revealing in that it appeared to render the presence of mental illness in war almost inevi-
table. Such an attitude was shared by other Republican psychiatrists, such as Nieto,
who argued that the prevalence of hysteria in wartime was understandable, and given
the circumstances, such patients could not be truly responsible for their psychic state.31
This recognition of the abnormality of war was in keeping with a liberal Republican
outlook, which sought to curb militarism and reduce the influence of the armed forces
over Spanish public life.32

27
Vallejo Nágera, Locura, 99. The degree to which and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930
traumatic events could provoke traumatic neurosis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003),
was the subject of heated debate within late nine- 10; Paul Lerner, ‘Psychiatry and Casualties of War in
teenth- and early twentieth-century German psychia- Germany, 1914–18’, Journal of Contemporary
try. From the Great War, neurologist Hermann History, 2000, 35, 13–28.
28
Oppenheim’s traumatic neurosis diagnosis—which Gonzalo Rodrı́guez Lafora, ‘La Psiquiatrı́a y
had since 1889 facilitated financial compensation for Neurologı́a de Guerra y de la Revolución. Sus prob-
the sufferers of trauma-induced conditions—was in- lemas y Soluciones’, Revista de Sanidad de Guerra,
creasingly marginalised in favour of the diagnosis of 1937, 1, 121–28.
29
hysteria, which situated the cause of illness in the Dionisio Nieto, ‘Psiquiatrı́a y Neurologı́a de Guerra’,
constitutional weakness of the individual. This shift in Revista de Sanidad de Guerra, 1937, 1, 182–93.
30
German psychiatry was witnessed first-hand by Emilio Mira, Psychiatry in War (London: Chapman &
Antonio Vallejo Nágera, who spent a year in Hall, 1944), 15.
31
Germany during the First World War inspecting POW Nieto, ‘Psiquiatrı́a y Neurologı́a’, 191.
32
camps as part of an international commission. See On military reform in Republican Spain, see, Michael
Richards, ‘Spanish Psychiatry’, Bulletin of Spanish Alpert, La Reforma Militar de Azan ~a (1931–1933)
Studies, 2004, 81–86, 836–38, 824; Paul Lerner, (Madrid: Siglo 21 de Espan ~a Editores, 1982). On the
Hysterical Men: War Psychiatry, and the Politics of long tradition of military involvement in Spanish poli-
Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca and London: tics, see Carolyn Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal
Cornell University Press, 2003), 9. On German Spain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
responses to Kriegsneurose during the First World 1979).
War, see Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War Psychiatry,
8 Stephanie Wright

In contrast, Vallejo and López Ibor presented war neuroses as abnormal psychiatric
conditions, placing greater emphasis on the constitutional weakness of the individual in
question.33 This understanding of war psychiatry was shaped by the Francoist side’s
National Catholic ideology, which presented the conflict in edifying terms, as ‘the tri-

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umph of light over darkness, of truth over error, health over sickness’.34 Indeed, in his
1939 monograph on madness in war (La Locura y la Guerra), Vallejo barely discussed
mental illness within the army, focusing instead on the psychological impact of the Civil
War on the civilian population, particularly within the ‘Marxist’ zone.35 Such were the
supposed rejuvenating properties of the ‘Crusade’ that Vallejo even claimed that the
Nationalist ‘liberation’ of formerly ‘red’ zones could prompt the immediate cure of local
asylum patients.36 Nationalist psychiatrists were not a homogenous group, and López
Ibor appeared far more willing to engage with genuine war pathology in military person-
nel while taking care to emphasise the scarcity of war neurosis.37 In his monograph on
war neurosis, López Ibor emphasised the importance of carefully selecting soldiers in or-
der to eliminate from the army those predisposed to mental illness.38 Yet he also stressed
that not all psychopathic personalities should be excluded from the army. In keeping
with Francoist notions on the importance of hierarchy in the maintaining of order, López
Ibor argued that military psychiatric patients should in fact be treated by reinserting them
back into the army and subordinating them to the military hierarchy.39 Thus, the patient
would understand that his destiny was to obey and would thereby be cured. Vallejo and
López Ibor thus depicted Nationalist militarism as the antidote to mental infirmity and
‘Marxist’ degeneracy while ignoring the possibility that soldiers could experience psycho-
logical trauma as a direct consequence of their involvement in the conflict.
Nationalist psychiatry was also shaped by Catholic understandings of the soul. In La
Locura y la Guerra, Vallejo dedicated a whole chapter to the spiritual conception of psy-
choses, in which he emphasised how psychiatry was not an exclusively biological or medi-
cal science but rather a speculative and metaphysical one, and that the soul could never
fall ‘ill’, only the brain, as the corporal organ of the soul.40 Similarly, López Ibor emphas-
ised how the experience of war neurosis depended on the unity of a man’s body and
spirit, which would determine a patient’s level of risk, thereby suggesting that a spiritually
healthy body could resist the psychological hardships of war.41 This belief in the health-
giving effects of spirituality, along with Vallejo’s emphasis on the organic (or bodily)
rather than spiritual origins of mental illness, helps to explain Nationalist psychiatrists’
attitudes towards the abnormality of psychopathology in war. Given the close relation-
ship between the mind and the soul, madness in the Francoist army was inconvenient in
that it contradicted Nationalist Catholic rhetoric that depicted the uprising as a regenera-
tive ‘Crusade’.

33
Vallejo Nágera, Locura, 7; López Ibor, Neurosis, 43– el concepto de jerarquı́a en la Espan ~a de la pos-
44. guerra’, in C. Boyd, ed., Religión y Polı́tica en la
34
Richards, Time of Silence, 9. Espan ~a Contemporánea (Madrid: Centro de Estudios
35
Vallejo Nágera, Locura, 247. Polı́ticos y Constitucionales, 2007), 83–106. Some
36
Ibid., 243–44. German psychiatrists followed a similar logic. See
37
López Ibor, Neurosis, 120. Lerner, ‘Psychiatry and Casualties of War’, 27.
38 40
Ibid., 110. Vallejo Nágera, Locura, 34.
39 41
Ibid., 113. On the importance of hierarchy in López Ibor, Neurosis, 38.
Francoist Spain, see Mary Vincent, ‘La Paz de Franco:
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 9

There were further cultural reasons for downplaying incidences of mental illness within
the Francoist army. Understandings of ‘neurosis’ are frequently gendered, and in Spain
the feminisation of mental illness was compounded by the broader socio-political
context.42 In Nationalist discourse, the defeat of the Second Republic—which had legal-

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ised divorce and given women the vote—was attributed to the ‘hystericisation’ of its
populace, rendered ‘barren’ through the disruption of traditional gender relations.43 The
‘Crusade’ allowed for the remasculinisation of Spain, through the virility, courage and
self-control of its foot soldiers.44 Those estimated 50,000 Francoist soldiers with physical
injuries slotted relatively easily into such discourses of heroism, sacrifice and stoicism, of-
ten, somewhat crudely, presented as the Christ-like, living martyrs of the conflict.45 In
contrast, those with mental illnesses bore no physical scars and presented a challenge to
the notion of self-control so central to Francoist understandings of masculinity.46 This
was particularly important after the war, when military models of masculinity transitioned
into a more stable vision of the Spanish man as responsible father and breadwinner, en-
capsulated in the 1945 Charter of Spaniards and the re-established 1889 Civil Code.47
The downplaying of mental illness within the Francoist army must in part, therefore, be
understood in terms of the gendered social restructuring of Spain both during and after
the Civil War.
There were also, undoubtedly, financial reasons for downplaying the link between
mental infirmity and war, particularly in the post-war period of severe economic crisis.48
As numerous scholars of other contexts have pointed out, war psychiatry only partly
centres on the care of patients but is also determined by the need, in war, to return sol-
diers to the battlefield and, in peace, to protect the nation’s coffers from the crippling
burden of pension pay-outs.49 This concern for the broader priorities of the nation above
individual patient care can be seen in Vallejo’s widely published concerns over the issue
of malingering (patomimia) or ‘pension neurosis’ (neurosis de renta), whereby it was
argued that ex-combatants were prone to exaggerating their wounds in order to receive

42 46
Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of On the refusal of the regime to compensate soldiers
Gender in Science and Medicine Between the incapacitated through physical illnesses, see
Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hemel AGMAV, C.2326, 50, 91, 9–12, Letter from the
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); Richards, President of the Royal Academy of Medicine of
‘Morality and Biology’, 395. Zaragoza, 25 June 1938; response from the
43
Ibid., 396. Inspector General of Health, 22 July 1938.
44 47
Mary Vincent, ‘La reafirmación de la masculinidad en These pieces of legislation discouraged female em-
la cruzada franquista’, Cuadernos de Historia ployment, particularly after marriage and also en-
Contemporánea, 2006, 28, 135–51, 136–38. sured that certain civil rights—such as opening a
45
Given the restrictive nature of the regime’s war dis- bank account or testifying in court—could only be
ability pensions coverage, 50,000 is likely a conserva- accessed with the husband’s consent. See Rosario
tive figure for those maimed in the conflict. ABC, 23 Ruiz Franco, ‘La Situación Legal: Discriminación y
October 1941; 24 October 1941. Stephanie Wright, Reforma’, in G. Niefla Cristóbal, ed., Mujeres y
‘Franco’s “Mutilated Gentlemen”: Masculinity and Hombres en la Espan ~a Franquista: Sociedad,
War Disability in Modern Spain, 1936–1976’, PhD Economı́a, Polı́tica, Cultura (Madrid: Editorial
thesis, (University of Sheffield, 2018); Marion Reder Complutense, 2003), 117–44, 122–24.
48
Gadow, ‘Una Imagen Controvertida de la Semana On autarchy and economic depression in 1940s
Santa Malaguen ~a: el Cristo de los Mutilados’, Los Spain, see Richards, Time of Silence.
49
crucificados, religiosidad, cofradı́as y arte: Actas del See, for example, Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves:
Simposium 3–6 September 2010 (San Lorenzo de El Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century
Escorial: Real Centro Universitario Escorial-Marı́a (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Cristina, 2010), 213–24, 214. Press, 2001), xviii–xix.
10 Stephanie Wright

more generous state hand-outs.50 Within such discussions, the steep budgetary costs
paid to the war disabled of the Great War were presented as a stark cautionary tale.51 In
the Spanish Civil War, Vallejo estimated that around 3,000 soldiers were declared unfit
for service due to ‘schizophrenia’, and that, if they were to be given pensions, this would

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‘gravely harm the national budget’.52 The categorisation of these soldiers as ‘schizo-
phrenic’ was therefore economically, as well as politically, convenient as it enabled the
state to dismiss soldiers’ pension claims on the grounds that their conditions were not
linked to their war service. Archival evidence from the regime’s psychiatric institutions
highlights the fragility of such diagnostic categories during and after the Civil War. Most
soldiers initially deemed to be suffering from war neurosis or psychosis were soon given
more conventional psychiatric diagnoses. One soldier interned in the provincial asylum in
Oviedo in 1937, for example, was initially diagnosed with ‘war psychosis’, before this
was changed to ‘aggressive madness’ and ultimately, ‘psychogenic depression’.53
In their work on schizophrenia, Francoist psychiatrists Luis Villanueva and José Marı́a
Pigem Serra offered an insight into the kinds of soldiers and pathologies included
amongst Vallejo’s 3,000 ‘schizophrenics’. When asked to describe the circumstances that
led to his arrival in the military hospital, one of their soldier patients—diagnosed as hav-
ing experienced a ‘schizophrenic reaction’—explained that he lost his reason on the
Catalonian front because he ‘wrote a lot’ to his friends, struggled to sleep and vomited
everything he ate. He recounted a chaotic arrival at the hospital in Zaragoza, whereby
the documentation pertaining to his transferal from the front went missing, and he was
subsequently accused of desertion. The patient remembered in detail his treatment at
the hospital:
They told me I had deserted . . . I had always been a dim-wit. They said I was red;
that my family was red . . . They ordered me to get out of bed, but I couldn’t. They
said they’d kill my family. They laughed at me because I used to cross myself in bed,
and they would say to me: check out the Russian. In other hospitals they told me I
was a criminal [. . .] Please don’t make my family suffer anymore! My family isn’t
red and I’m not either!54
This is only one case where the boundary between delusion and reality is particularly diffi-
cult to disentangle. The patient’s description of his experience at the hospital—clearly
presented as a delusion by Villanueva and Pigem Serra—is perfectly credible within the
prevailing socio-political context: many scholars have noted the tendency of military
authorities to mistake mental illness for cowardice or disobedience, and many people

50
Antonio Vallejo Nájera, ‘Reacciones Psicógenas en XVI al XX (Zaragoza: Imprenta Heraldo de Aragón,
los Mutilados de Guerra’, Revista Espan ~ola de Cirugı́a 1971).
52
y Medicina, 1942, 5, 1–12, 8; La Simulación de la Vallejo Nájera, ‘Reacciones Psicógenas’, 3.
53
Enfermedad (Barcelona: Editora Nacional, 1939); Archivo Histórico de Asturias (henceforth AHA),
Sı́ndromes Mentales Simulados (Barcelona: Editorial Fondo del Hospital Psiquiátrico Provincial, 1792.
54
Labor, 1930). Luis F. Villanueva and José Marı́a Pigem Serra,
51
Vallejo Nájera, ‘Reacciones Psicógenas’, 2. See also ‘Tratamiento de la Esquizofrenia por el Cardiazol’,
Agustı́n Garcı́a Lafora, Mutilados de Guerra por la Revista Espan ~ola de Medicina y Cirugı́a de Guerra,
Patria: Historia (Soldados Viejos y Estropeados) Siglos 1940, 20, 285–98, 292.
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 11

were killed or imprisoned in the Nationalist zone for their association with the ‘red’
Republic.55 Villanueva and Pigem Serra did not explain the reasoning behind their
‘schizophrenic reaction’ diagnosis, but it is clear from the evidence provided that this cat-
egorisation demonstrated only a superficial engagement with the patient’s recent war-

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time experiences, particularly his distress when faced with accusations of political
subversion within the hospital.
By implying that the origins of an individual’s condition were hereditary or constitutional,
the ‘schizophrenia’ diagnosis also failed to consider the psychological impact of the often-
distressing circumstances experienced by soldiers during the war itself. Indeed, it is clear
from the work of Republican psychiatrists like Emilio Mira that the Civil War did produce
psychiatric casualties, at least on the opposite side of the front.56 The ‘delusions’ of
Francoist military patients often reproduced Nationalist rhetoric, and the persecution of
Republicans in particular left its mark on many Francoist soldiers. In 1938, for example, one
ex-combatant diagnosed with ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ stated that when his illness began,
‘everyone started looking at me because they thought I was red’.57 Another soldier, diag-
nosed with ‘hebefrenic-catatonic schizophrenia’, would cry insisting that ‘I am not a spy’.58
Post-war Francoist psychiatrists paid little attention to patient narratives, particularly
when these contradicted the wider ideological landscape of the ‘New Spain’ or pointed
to causes that deviated from heredity or constitutional theory. Hence, a soldier expressing
fear at the prospect of being considered a ‘red’ could be classified as schizophrenic,
rather than someone responding rationally to hostile circumstances. In war, experiences
and perceptions of psychiatric patients are often shaped by macro-level military strate-
gists, policy makers and prevailing narratives of the war.59 In Spain, the redemptive
‘Crusade’ narrative would not accommodate those who had lost their minds fighting to
establish the ‘New Spain’; therefore, in so far as the regime was concerned, there were
no traumatised veterans, only individuals whose pre-existing pathologies had been
revealed under the pressures of war. While such discourses were in keeping with the con-
stitutional theory so influential to Spanish psychiatrists, the dismissal of mentally ill sol-
diers was both economically and ideologically strategic and would have significant
implications on the lives of the mentally infirm.60

55
Shephard, War of Nerves, 28; Barham, Forgotten who could shift their reading of constitutional theory
Lunatics, 17; Virgili Ibarz Serrat, ‘El Caso del to shift their particular objectives. This was particu-
Comandante Ramón Lloro Regales (1895–1954), larly the case for the regime’s nefarious child inter-
EduPsykhé, 2014, 13, 13–32. On repression in the vention policy, which often involved removing
Nationalist zone during the war, see, for example, children from their Republican parents in order to be
Preston, Spanish Holocaust; Rodrigo, Hasta la Raı́z. ‘re-educated’ either in a Francoist orphanage or by
56
Mira, Psychiatry in War, 63-81; ‘War neuroses’, The middle-class families sympathetic to the regime. In
Lancet, July 15 1939, 153. this case, heredity could not be regarded as deter-
57
Unidad Gestión de Mutilados (henceforth UGM), ministic, as to do so would undermine the logic of in-
Ministerio de Defensa, Registro General 2328. tervention. Amparo Gomez and Antonio Fco.
58
Villanueva and Pigem Serra, ‘Tratamiento de la Canales, ‘Children’s Education and Mental Health in
Esquizofrenia, 289. Spain During and after the Civil War: Psychiatry,
59
Shephard, War of Nerves, 18–19; Jay Winter, ‘Shell- Psychology and “Biological Pedagogy” at the service
Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, of Franco’s regime’, Pedagógica Histórica:
Journal of Contemporary History, 2000, 35, 7–11, 7–8. International Journal of the History of Education,
60
Amparo Gomez and Antonio Canales have 2016, 52, 154–68, 167.
highlighted the pragmatism of Francoist psychiatrists,
12 Stephanie Wright

War Psychiatry and the Law: Mental Health Provisions for Francoist
Military Personnel
Given the reluctance of Francoist psychiatrists to acknowledge the psychological fall-out
of the war, it is perhaps surprising that legislation was passed in 1944 to support military

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‘lunatics’ (dementes).61 The timing of this law presents a clue to its envisaged beneficia-
ries. Introduced five years after the war, the 1944 law purportedly allowed all Francoist
military personnel immobilised through ‘lunacy’, ‘no matter what the cause’, to join the
Francoist state’s disabled veterans’ corps, the BCMGP. Yet by this point, it was becoming
increasingly difficult for Civil War conscripts to prove that the war had caused their psy-
chological conditions, particularly given the diagnostic uncertainty surrounding war neu-
rosis. Indeed, an update to the law in 1948 specified that mental illness would be
recognised when its cause was clearly traceable to military service, such as (physically)
traumatic lesions, malnutrition or infection.62 Meanwhile, psychiatric conditions such as
hereditary schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and paranoia would only be recog-
nised if the patient had seen at least 10 years of active service. Few conscripts who
returned to civilian life after the three-year-long Civil War had clocked up the years of ser-
vice required to benefit from these provisions. Clearly, the legislation was designed to
compensate long-serving military personnel rather than to support traumatised Civil War
soldiers. In this sense, Francoist understandings of who was deserving and undeserving
of state support were not only determined by an individual’s Civil War allegiance—veter-
ans of the Republican army were, of course, excluded from both the 1944 and 1948 leg-
islation—but also within the Francoist side, by an individual’s proximity to the military
establishment. Short-term service in the Civil War, if it did not lead to a military career af-
ter the conflict, counted for little in the eyes of Francoist policymakers. In part, this phe-
nomenon can be understood if we consider that the vast majority of Civil War soldiers
were conscripts, whose ideological commitment to the Nationalist cause was far from as-
sured.63 While the armed forces were keen to protect their own, conscripted soldiers
were not considered part of the ‘great military family’.64
Those who benefitted from the legislation tended to have physical injuries to the head,
such as one legionnaire, who was left with post-traumatic epilepsy following a head in-
jury sustained at the battle of Brunete in July 1937.65 Others were professional soldiers
whose careers either pre-dated 1936 or who remained in the army after the Civil War.
For example, one second lieutenant weapons engineer who entered the army in 1937
was diagnosed with ‘organic dementia’ (demencia orgánica) in 1968, caused by
Alzheimer’s disease.66 Despite being entirely unrelated to his war service, his condition
was recognised by the state in February 1969. Similarly, one air force volunteer remained
in the army after the Civil War and was promoted to corporal in 1941.67 He first received

61
Boletı́n Oficial del Estado, 2, 2 January 1945, 69–70. Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Fontana
62
BOE, 119, 28 April 1948. Press, 1995), 10.
63 65
James Matthews, Reluctant Warriors: Republican UGM, 9668. Please note that here ‘post-traumatic’
Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the refers to a physical injury to the head.
66
Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Oxford: Oxford UGM, 9276.
67
University Press, 2012), 2–3, 66, 102, 142, 179. UGM, 5406.
64
This was a common term used by insiders to refer to
the Spanish armed forces. See, for example, Paul
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 13

treatment for a ‘mental derangement crisis’ (crisis de enajenación mental) some years
later, in 1951, which was followed by similar episodes between 1952 and 1958, culmi-
nating in his internment in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric clinic in southern Madrid.
Diagnosed with ‘delirious schizophrenia’, he was recognised by a military medical tribunal

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as eligible for state support. Unfortunately, he never received a pension, as he died in
1961 before his application could be concluded, testifying to the limitations of the bu-
reaucratic apparatus, even for those who were entitled to benefit from it.
For those soldiers whose conditions were purely psychiatric in nature, and who did not
have the requisite number of service years, evacuation to a psychiatric hospital straight
from the front was no guarantee of recognition as a military ‘lunatic’. One 23-year-old in-
fantry soldier was diagnosed with catatonia and brought to the provincial psychiatric hos-
pital in Oviedo in the northern mining region of Asturias. Prior to the war, the soldier had
no personal or family history of mental illness, and his father stated that his illness began
‘suddenly when hearing the order to go to the front’.68 The soldier himself also made the
connection between his war service and subsequent illness, explaining that ‘I became ill
because I was in the revolution. They took me to war and I was afraid.’ Despite this ap-
parent link, no attempts were made to assess his status as a military ‘lunatic’. Similarly,
another recruit’s mother explained that her son’s military service began well, but at
around the age of 22 or 23 years, he was sent back home accompanied by two nurses
‘completely disturbed and declared unfit for service’.69 Despite showing no signs of men-
tal illness prior to his war service, the soldier was first interned in the psychiatric hospital
in Palencia and subsequently spent the best part of 30 years in and out of the asylum in
Oviedo in 1940, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Despite the cir-
cumstances of his initial hospitalisation, during this long period of confinement, the vet-
eran was never assessed by the military medical tribunal for recognition by the BCMGP.
One ‘schizophrenic’ soldier was granted recognition by the 1944 legislation before the
publication of the more restrictive 1948 law.70 Originally from Galicia, the soldier had
served in the Civil War until he was declared unfit for service in late 1938.71 Recognised
as a demente in the summer of 1945, he lived in the provincial psychiatric asylum in
Leganés until his death of tuberculosis in 1948. Again, the long road to recognition for
this soldier, as well as his psychiatric confinement and premature death, illustrates the
limitations of the Francoist state’s provisions. Indeed, the short life spans of many psychi-
atric patients reflected the often-appalling conditions within Spain’s provincial asylums.72
In his memoirs, psychiatrist and ardent critic of the Francoist regime Carlos Castilla del
Pino described how internment in a psychiatric institution seemed to erase patients’
sense of self.73 This experience was common to veterans in other contexts, and Peter
Barham has described how British soldiers were asked to remove their uniforms upon ar-
rival at the asylum, literally stripping them of their military identities. Certainly, once a

68
AHA, expediente 1675. 54–65, 63; Carlos Castilla del Pino, Casa del Olivo:
69
AHA, expediente 4761. Autobiografı́a (1949–2003) (Barcelona: Editorial
70
IPJG, XXSI01174. Tusquets, 2004), esp. 426–27.
71 73
UGM, 2328. Carlos Castilla del Pino, Pretérito Imperfecto:
72
Rafael Huertas, ‘Spanish Psychiatry: The Second Autobiografı́a (1922–1949) (Barcelona: Tusquets
Republic, the Civil War, and the Aftermath’, Editores, 1997), 439. Barham, Forgotten Lunatics,
International Journal of Mental Health, 2006–07, 35, 21.
14 Stephanie Wright

Francoist veteran became part of the Spanish civilian psychiatric system, his military past
had little or no bearing on the treatment or care he received. Veterans usually ceased to
be referred to as ex-combatants at all, unless they had been recognised by the BCMGP
for physical injury.

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Psychological Trauma in Popular Discourse: An Open Secret?
Thus far, this article has identified two categories of mentally ill soldier: those who were
recognised by the state due to the physical origins of their wounds or the length of their
military service and those who did not meet the restrictive criteria of the 1948 law. There
remains a third, more obscured, category of mentally ill soldier: men with more hidden
conditions such as depression or guilt who never considered applying for state pensions
and who were generally able to manage their conditions privately. Literary scholars such
as Lorraine Ryan and Caragh Wells have highlighted the ubiquity of the depressed and
neurotic male within post-war Spanish literature and film, but lived experiences of such
psychological aftermaths remain unexplored within the historiography of modern
Spain.74 The casework of psychiatrists such as Carlos Castilla del Pino is vital to glimpsing
the extent of psychological trauma in the Spanish post-war period. Castilla, who notes in
his memoirs that he would have been unable to write his ground-breaking study on de-
pression without having witnessed the psychological fall-out of the Civil War, offers con-
vincing evidence of military personnel struggling to process their wartime experiences.75
In particular, Castilla reported an underlying ‘consciousness of complicity’ in the troubled
patients he encountered under the dictatorship, especially those who had been direct or
indirect perpetrators of violence.76
This was noted by a young Castilla when he was called upon to do his military service
in El Ferrol (Galicia) in 1947.77 There he met a 40-year-old captain named Arias Gay,
known in the barracks for his violent outbursts and frequent neurotic episodes, which
were known to last up to a month. Aware of Castilla’s psychiatric training, one day the
captain recounted:

We caught around 40 red prisoners, and put them in a cow pen near my position.
We confiscated some flamethrowers, which we had never used; they must be
Russian. In my tent the sergeant came to me and said: ‘Lieutenant, what should we
do with these flamethrowers?’. It occurred to me to tell him: let’s go and try them.
We went to the pen. I told the sergeant to lean the barrel of the flamethrower be-
tween the fence and I gave him the order: shoot! A flame came out, startling us.
All of them were falling charred to the floor, but three or four who the flames
hadn’t reached remained standing at the back. They had a very strange expression:
eyes open wide, black faces, from the soot . . . I have never seen it since. I said: ser-
geant, again! The sergeant pulled the trigger again and they fell too.78

74 75
Lorraine Ryan, ‘Writing the Ineffable: Postwar Female On the psychological impact of life under the dicta-
Employment and Domestic Violence in Carmen torship, see Carlos Castilla del Pino, ‘Problemas
Laforet’s Nada’, Forum for Modern Language Psicológicas de Una Generación’, El Paı́s ‘Extra’, 20
Studies, 2017, 53, 463–82, 468; Caragh Wells, November 1985, 18.
76
‘“The (Male) Problem That Had No Name”: Male Richards, After the Civil War, 218.
77
Neurosis in Postwar Spanish Fiction and Film’, Castilla, Pretérito Imperfecto, 450–64.
78
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 97, 191–209. Ibid., 464–65.
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 15

Arias Gay never admitted to feelings of remorse and in fact responded to Castilla’s dis-
may at the horrifying tale stating that ‘Well, yes, but we had to do something with those
prisoners.’79 Indeed, given Arias Gay’s prominent position in the army, it is unsurprising
that he refused to articulate in explicit terms his regret for his actions during the war.

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Though his fixation on this anecdote is certainly suggestive of psychological disturbance,
perhaps more remarkable was the way in which Arias Gay’s company developed strate-
gies to accommodate what they casually referred to as his ‘neura days’.80 This involved a
designated assistant regularly taking up food to his room, a task that Castilla himself was
obliged to perform some time later. Arias Gay’s neurotic episodes certainly subverted the
Francoist masculine ideal of self-control and responsible breadwinning. However, as a
bachelor living in an all-male institution, Arias Gay did not lead a typical domestic life,
and as a captain, he was well-established enough that his episodes could be dismissed
and incorporated into the routine of military life. Practically speaking, Arias Gay’s rank
also meant that he was in a position to command his men to cover for him. As a man of
rank who had already proven his ferocity in the Civil War, such episodes were incorpo-
rated into his masculine identity in a way that almost enhanced his reputation. Indeed,
Castilla described how the very sight of the ‘neura’ Arias Gay was enough to make
some soldiers tremble, perhaps not an unwelcome trait in an institution that demanded
absolute obedience to one’s superiors.81 Certainly, this adoption and adaptation of the
language of nerves and neurosis reflected a certain accommodation of war-related psy-
chological disturbance within popular discourse.
The Civil War also created many circumstances in which individuals were forced to
stand by as friends or former acquaintances were killed, which could also cause feelings
of guilt. One of Castilla’s patients, a 50-year-old ex-army officer, recounted with shame
his ‘cowardice’ when faced with the outbreak of war and the imminent execution of a
former colleague in 1936. The veteran in question had applied for early retirement under
the 1931 Republican law introduced by Minister for War Manuel Azan ~a to reduce the
size of the top-heavy armed forces.82 Such reform was vilified in certain military circles as
an anti-patriotic attack on the army, and so Castilla’s patient went into hiding following
the July coup, fearful that he would be arrested and shot for his engagement with the
policy. After spending several weeks hiding in a half-abandoned chalet just outside of
Cordoba, the retired officer eventually escaped to Granada, where he presented himself
to the nearest barracks offering his services to the Francoist cause, explaining that he’d
just escaped from the ‘red’ zone. A short while later, he witnessed the following scene:

One evening, [the patient] saw a bus enter the barracks carrying two commandants
(comandantes) who had refused to join the uprising, and who were to be shot in
front of the troops. [The patient] and other officials approached the bus; as he was
climbing out, one of the commandants looked up towards them. It turned out he
was a former classmate, who recognised [the patient], but, undoubtedly to avoid

79
Ibid., 465. lematic given the armed forces’ historical tendency
80
Ibid., 464. to intervene in political affairs. Alpert, Reforma
81
Ibid., 465-466. Militar.
82
The Spanish army was home to a disproportionately
high number of officers, which was potentially prob-
16 Stephanie Wright

compromising his position, restricted himself to looking at him, as if he simply

wished for some sympathy before he died. Terrified, [the patient] avoided his eyes
and turned his back, denying him—and this was his regret—this small compassion-
ate gesture. He left towards the sentry post. From there he heard the shots of the

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firing squad and the coup de grace which finished them off.83

Not only does this anecdote highlight the complex, and often pragmatic, reasons for join-
ing the military uprising, it also illustrates the psychological aftermaths of the moral com-
promises many were forced to make in order to survive. That Castilla’s patient used the
language of ‘cowardice’ to describe his behaviour is suggestive of the chaotic emotional
landscape that existed under a regime which at once espoused the masculine values of
‘bravery’ and ‘courage’ while castrating individual autonomy. Certainly, complicity with
or even passive acquiescence to atrocities committed during the Civil War did not neces-
sarily imply the absence of psychological discomfort. Such private trauma remained hid-
den, confined to the domestic setting, though it also emerged later on through the trope
of guilt within the literary works of authors such Antonio Buero Vallejo. In Buero’s 1968
La Doble Historia del Doctor Valmy (The Double Story of Doctor Valmy), for example, the
protagonist, Daniel, experiences impotence after participating in the mutilation of a polit-
ical prisoner. Such representations again suggested a popular awareness of the psycho-
logical implications of the Civil War, even for those who ended up on the winning side.84
Indeed, despite the regime’s dismissal of Civil War veterans with psychiatric disorders,
it is clear that an implicit understanding and even sympathy for psychological trauma de-
veloped in Francoist Spain, at times fuelled by the regime’s own martyrisation of those
who had sacrificed or risked their lives during the war.85 During the war and for many
years after, the Francoist regime encouraged the publication of endless martyrologies,
which drew on Catholic imagery of the suffering of Christ in order to laud the sacrifices
of Spaniards during the war. The most famous of these was founder of the Spanish
Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, immortalised as the ‘absent one’ (el ausente) fol-
lowing his execution by Republican forces in November 1936.86 In this sense, while
Spaniards never used the term ‘trauma’, they frequently articulated the notion of Civil
War-related psychological distress through the regime’s own martyrdom discourse. This
more popular language of psychological trauma developed an important exculpatory
function within the repressive context of Francoist Spain, whereby mental illness could be
used to excuse or mitigate behaviours that subverted the regime’s broader social, political
and cultural norms.

83 85
Castilla del Pino, Casa del Olivo, 128. On the language and iconography of martyrdom
84
Antonio Buero Vallejo, La Doble Historia del Doctor during the Civil War, see Mary Vincent, ‘The Martyrs
Valmy (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1976 [1968]), 65. See and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of
also Antonio Buero Vallejo’s La Fundación (Madrid: the Francoist Crusade’, History Workshop Journal,
Austral, 2009 [1974]), in which the protagonist 1999, 0, 68–98.
86
Tomás experiences delusions linked to his guilt at On Primo de Rivera as el ausente, see Paul Preston,
having denounced, under torture, his four comrades. Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War
On literary representations of male neurosis under (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 75–110.
Francoism, see Ryan, ‘Writing the Ineffable’ and
Wells, ‘The (Male) Problem That Had No Name’.
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 17

One striking example of this phenomenon came in the case of soldiers whose sexual
promiscuity during their military service endangered the foundational block of the
Francoist state, the family.87 Long-serving military personnel were able to utilise the
1944/1948 mental health legislation to mask or explain away the neuropsychiatric symp-

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toms of syphilis, which would not otherwise have been eligible for a disability pension.
One infantry lieutenant, for example, wrote to the Spanish Army Minister in 1941 asking
to be relocated to bureaucratic duties. Aged 46 years, the lieutenant had entered the
army as a teenager and had served throughout the Rif War and the Spanish Civil War. In
his letter, he explained that he was no longer able to carry out his usual duties as secre-
tary of his local military tribunal as he had been suffering from an illness ‘perhaps caused
by the vicissitudes of the Moroccan campaigns’.88 The specificities of his illness, which in-
cluded symptoms such as psychosis and anaemia, help to shed light on the veteran’s
vague allusion to the brutalities of the Rif War. In an accompanying medical certificate,
he was said to be suffering from ‘general progressive paralysis’, the neuropsychiatric
condition linked to the advanced stages of venereal disease. For this officer, it was clearly
preferable to hint at a psychological explanation for his illness than draw attention to
its links with syphilis, and he was fortunate that those managing his case conveniently
overlooked the true origins of his condition.89 In this sense, and somewhat paradoxically,
psychiatric disorders in Francoist Spain could be both stigmatising and exculpatory.
Mental illness could also mitigate disobedience in war, even in such grave cases as
desertion. This was the case for one 25-year-old tailor from Lérida, who entered the
Oviedo provincial asylum in July 1939 on the orders of a military tribunal. Diagnosed with
‘paranoid syndrome characterised by delirium of persecution’, the soldier had already
been tried by the war courts for reasons that he claimed were unclear to him but which
were almost certainly related to his desertion from the Nationalist army and subsequent
enrolment in the Republican armed forces. After the defeat of the Republican army, the
soldier had been imprisoned by the Francoist authorities, during which time he claimed
he had been subject to physical abuse at the hands of the ‘reds’ with whom he had been
held, adding that these had ‘not allowed him to sleep[,] bothering him with kicks and
punches, separating themselves from him and not wanting to make a life in a company
within the prison’.90 By emphasising the ‘red’ violence he experienced in prison, he
inserted himself into broader discourses of Nationalist ‘martyrdom’. He also used his time
in the asylum to demonstrate his commitment to the Francoist regime. In a diagnostic
questionnaire in which patients were asked about their values and hopes for the future,
the soldier expressed that his utmost desire was to ‘make Spain great’ (‘poder

87
The 1945 Charter of Spaniards (Fuero de los real disease. In a rare piece of documented evidence
Espan~oles) described the family as a ‘natural and fun- testifying to the fraudulent collaboration of medical
damental institution within society with rights and staff in BCMGP applications, an anonymous corre-
duties before and above all positive human law’. See spondent told the Director of the El Conjo psychiatric
BOE, 199, ‘Fuero de los Espan ~oles’, 18 July 1945, institution in Santiago de Compostela not to mention
359. the syphilitic origins of the soldier’s condition to the
88
Archivo General Militar de Segovia (henceforth BCMGP, lest this impede his access to a pension.
AGMS), D-1264. Arquivo de Galicia, Fondo Documental del Hospital
89
A further example of this phenomenon can be found Psiquiátrico de Conxo (henceforth AG), 65839/24.
90
in the psychiatric case file of one infantry sergeant AHA, 2059, Psychiatric report, 28 July 1939.
also suffering from the neurological effects of vene-
18 Stephanie Wright

engrandecer a Espan ~a’). This strategy bore fruit, and the soldier was released as ‘cured’
in January 1940. In this case, the asylum constituted a site in which an individual could
whitewash a dubious past.91
The case of Dolores and her lieutenant husband Enrique outlined in the introduction to

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this article encapsulates the ways in which Spaniards adapted official discourses in order
to negotiate the system.92 Two years into the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, Dolores met
and married Enrique after a whirlwind romance in the Nationalist zone. Just a short while
later, Dolores began to notice that her new husband was ‘somewhat of a drinker’
and ‘very prone to lying’. Enrique’s behaviour took another turn after sustaining an in-
jury to the abdomen while serving at the front. After a period of convalescence,
Enrique failed to return to his post and was thereby stripped of his rank. After the Civil
War, Enrique enlisted in the Blue Division and travelled east to serve Hitler in the
Second World War. There he sustained further injuries, this time to his right leg and
hands, which were recognised by the BCMGP. By 1947, Enrique’s behaviour had dete-
riorated considerably, and his tendency to steal, drink and stir up public disorder had
led to his expulsion from the BCMGP and eventual confinement to the Santa Isabel
asylum in Leganés. By 1959, after several failed attempts to rehabilitate Enrique at
home—during which time he frequently beat his wife and squandered the family
income—Dolores wrote to the asylum in Leganés explaining that she would only
take him back if ordered by the courts. Under the Francoist regime, divorce was not an
option.93
Both Dolores and Enrique’s sister pointed to the psychologically traumatic events of
the Civil War to explain his problematic conduct. Enrique’s sister told the psychiatrists in
Leganés that he was:
Very sociable and always in the company of boys and girls. Very preoccupied.
Normal behaviour not going out at night. During our war he was very persecuted
and threatened with shooting and had to enter an embassy from which he passed
to the National zone and they knew nothing more of him. When the war ended he
returned married with his current wife. At that point you could see he was a great
liar, that everything he said was a lie.

His wife Dolores was similarly inclined to highlight the persecution Enrique had suffered
at the hands of the ‘reds’ during the Civil War. In an attempt to reinstate her husband’s
disability benefits in 1947, Dolores wrote to the director of Santa Isabel requesting a cer-
tificate that would testify to Enrique’s lack of culpability:
The document . . . should certify . . . the absolute or relative certainty that [his illness]
was caused, or brought out of its latent state if constitutional, by the impression

91
A similar case was that of Ramón Lloro Regales, a Lloro’s illness was viewed sympathetically by the mili-
Nationalist commandant who, during an apparent fit tary tribunal given his psychological condition, and
of madness, deserted to the Republican side from his death penalty was commuted to 30 years in
the Madrid front just weeks before the end of the prison, of which he served just 5 years. See Ibarz
conflict. Despite the high penalties for desertion and Serrat, ‘El Caso’ .
92
the sensitive timing of the commandant’s actions, IPJG, XXSI01566.
93
which risked prematurely unveiling Nationalist plans Ruiz Franco, ‘La Situación Legal’, 117–44.
for an impending assault on the besieged capital,
 Spanish Civil War Veterans, Mental Illness and the Francoist Regime 19

left on the patient by the episodes of severe Marxist persecution, which he himself
suffered, and which were suffered by his brother [. . .], murdered by the reds in
Bilbao, as well as the wounds he sustained, first in our War of Liberation as a lieu-
tenant in the National army, and later in Russia . . . his madness totally excuses all

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his various misdemeanours . . .

Here, Dolores illustrated a clear awareness of the implications of constitutional psychiatric

theory on her husband’s access to state support and mobilised Francoist discourse per-
taining to the ‘Marxist persecution’ in order to bolster her claims to his worthiness of a
disability pension. In this letter, the trope of martyrdom acted as a substitute for the
notion of psychological trauma, which Dolores believed would mitigate her husband’s
behaviour. In this sense, the case of Enrique and his family offers a valuable glimpse into
popular discourses of psychological disturbance and their interaction with academic
psychiatric thought under Franco’s dictatorship. The statements of Dolores and Enrique’s
sister reflected the popular belief that dangerous or fearful wartime experiences could al-
ter the psychic states of those who lived through them, and that articulating this belief
constituted an effective strategy when presenting one’s needs to representatives of the
state. For Dolores, the idea that traumatic experiences in the war could be damaging to
one’s mental health enabled her to negotiate the contradiction of having a husband who
was both a maimed Civil War ‘hero’ and incapable of living up to the masculine ideal of
responsible husband and breadwinner, under a regime that afforded her no escape from
her abusive marriage.

Conclusion
This article has illustrated the reluctance of Francoist psychiatrists to acknowledge the
psychological fallout of the Spanish Civil War on those soldiers who helped to ensure the
Nationalist victory. This attitude towards ‘war neurosis’ can partially be explained by
Spanish psychiatry’s entrenchment within constitutional psychiatric theory, which attrib-
uted mental illness to the weakness of the individual. Yet this policy was also convenient
for the regime, politically, culturally and economically. The scepticism of Francoist
psychiatrists was reflected in the support—or lack thereof—that mentally ill veterans
received from the state. The restrictive, and tardy, legislation of 1944 and 1948 generally
protected patients with physical lesions, as well as psychiatric patients with long-
established careers in the armed forces. Such state structures capitalised on the difficul-
ties in proving war as a causal link for mental illness, reflecting the state’s desire to avoid
the hefty pension bill faced by belligerent nations in the Great War. Yet the pressurised
conditions of the dictatorship contributed to the development of different, more popular
discourses surrounding the idea of war trauma. As the case of Arias Gay shows, mental
illness could be somewhat of an open secret and was certainly tolerated in contexts like
the armed forces, especially when it involved an individual of status. This article has iden-
tified different languages of trauma within popular discourse, including the adaptation
of psychiatric terms such as ‘neurosis’ and ‘psychopathy’, as well as the appropriation of
Francoism’s own language of martyrdom to articulate the concept of psychological
distress resulting from ‘Marxist persecution’ during the Civil War. The fact that many suc-
ceeded in excusing themselves from misdemeanours testifies to the potency of such
20 Stephanie Wright

discourse in the post-war period and beyond, despite the readiness of psychiatrists to dis-
miss the existence of ‘exogenous’ causes—rather than triggers—of mental illness.
This study of the experiences of mentally ill soldiers of the ‘Crusade’ allows us to make
a broader point about the nature of Spanish society in the years and decades following

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the Spanish Civil War. That the Francoist dictatorship made life impossible for many for-
mer supporters of the Republic, many of whom were killed or forced into internal or ex-
ternal exile, is beyond doubt. Yet we should not shy away from delving into the lives of
those ‘ordinary’ individuals who helped Franco to secure his victory in the Civil War. The
‘victor-vanquished’ dichotomy, which still characterises much of the historiography on
post-war Spain, masks the fact that the regime was neglectful of many of those who had
played such a fundamental role in bringing it to power. The voices of Franco’s ‘lunatics’
testify to the deficiencies of the regime, even for those who had demonstrated their loy-
alty to the Nationalist side in the Civil War.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities for funding this
research. I am also grateful to Mary Vincent and the Social History of Medicine’s editors
and anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback and insightful comments.