http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34f637/ptsd_and_therapy_from_wwi_onwards/

Here's an answer I gave to a similar question earlier; this one deals specifically with the British case, but it should give you a basis to go off of.

Suffice to say, opinion and views on 'shell shock' were often divisive and fluctuated greatly. It was generally viewed as a serious condition, especially extreme cases involving blindness and loss of bodily functions, and there were different approaches made to understanding and treating it.

When the war ended of course, those wartime divisions of opinion didn't make things any easier for understanding 'shell shock', which encompassed a wide variety of physiological and psychological afflictions stemming from combat (though it did affect individuals with no combat experience whatsoever), making the reaching of a consensus that much more troublesome. In the end, a British commission came down on the side of those that saw it as a 'morale problem', that could be avoided through good training and leadership. It should, I think, be said that the efforts undertaken to identify, treat, combat and comprehend 'shell shock' helped to lay the seeds for future developments and a greater understanding of war-related mental trauma. Much more so, at least, than works like the 'regeneration' trilogy imply.

Might be frightfully specific, but at least a handful of them got to spend time talking to an orderly named Andre Breton, who'd been reading about this new thing called a "talking cure" invented by this Austrian doctor named Freud.

Breton said of his work in the psychiatric wards in Nantes and Saint-Dizier, "Nothing affects me so much as interpreting these madmen."

A few years later, he founded the art movement of Surrealism, inspired in part by the powerful poetry of his patients.

But the fact that a student and poet was treating these soldiers might indicate something about the standards in the French military hospitals.

I have a feeling I've read more about Breton's hospital work in his own writings, but I can't put a hand on in right now - the most significant thing that happened was that he met a physically wounded soldier, Jaques Vache, who became his hero/role model, so most of his writing is about Vache and not what he was doing in his own wards.

There is some information to be gleaned about Breton's training and his psychological work under Dr. Raoul-Achille Leroy in this Brain: A Journal of Neurology article.