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CHAPTER 1
"Imaging the Mind"
Military Psychiatry Meets Documentary Film
"Wars today, accompanied by their terrific mechanical developments, create emotional stresses which are bound to hurt seriously large numbers of those engaged in them. It is the basic and major function of military psychiatrists to care for these people who have been made emotionally sick by the pressures of stresses of modern warfare."
— Dr. John Milne Murray, psychiatrist, Army Air Forces, 1947
Between 1925 and 1940, the cost of caring for "psychologically disturbed" ex-servicemen, who occupied nearly half of all beds in Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals, approached one billion dollars. By 1947, the situation had become graver still, with the VA forced to note that "the numbers of beds assigned to neurological and psychiatric patients exceed those of all other types put together," and that "there is nothing vague about these figures." World War II had dramatically expanded the cultural visibility of post-traumatic conditions, compelling the military to directly address this pronounced "psychiatric problem" through documentary film. As early as 1942, medical officers were given crash courses in psychiatry at, among other establishments, the Army's School of Military Neuropsychiatry on Long Island, and psychiatrists were increasingly incorporated into the armed forces in an advisory capacity. World War II represented, as Rebecca Jo Plant puts it, "a major boon to American psychiatry"; it "spurred the ascendance of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches and the destigmatization and normalization of mental disorders, setting the stage for the flourishing of postwar therapeutic culture." Many at the VA nevertheless believed that more needed to be done to draw attention to the psychological problems that veterans continued to confront in the postwar period. As Dr. Daniel Blain, chief of the VA's Neuropsychiatry Division, put it in a 1947 report, "The size of the job to be done in this field has suffered from vagueness, exaggeration, misunderstanding, and sometimes a Pollyanna attitude of wishful thinking." Such naïve optimism, Blain and others felt, could be countered through the ongoing distribution of "serious" films about trauma — works of nonfiction that, endorsed by the military, examined some of the practical difficulties of psychiatric treatment, particularly in understaffed or otherwise inadequate state facilities.
Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with — but scarcely limited to — documentary film. In accounts of the period, American documentary is typically understood as having been stymied by the needs of a federal government that had previously (as with the formation of the United States Film Service in 1938) placed a premium on documentary's formal development as a tool for communicating government policy. Some scholars go so far as to argue that the Second World War merely extended the constraints that the Great Depression had placed on documentary artistry, ensuring a "patriotic" homogeneity in the wake of congressional attacks on the arguably partisan work of Pare Lorentz and others. Michael Renov rehearses this claim when he writes, "The priorities enforced by the Depression and World War II reined in the experimentalism and unabashed subjectivity of expression that had so enlivened documentary practice in the 1920s." This is, of course, hardly true if one considers the contributions to wartime documentary of such creative, often self-aggrandizing figures as Frank Capra, John Ford, and John Huston, who inscribed their "government work" with various authorial signatures. But it is perhaps even less true if one looks at the priorities of military psychiatrists and other psychological professionals, which reach expression in a number of films that have long been left out of accounts of documentary's development in the United States. Renov goes on to note that "[p]rivate visions and careerist goals have always commingled with the avowed social aims of collective documentary endeavors," demanding precisely the kind of reevaluation of wartime nonfiction that he does not undertake in his account of historically-specific conservatism — a reevaluation that would bring to light the vital impact of individuals who, while not nearly as famous as Ford and Capra, far outnumbered such uniformed auteurs.
This book looks at some of the subjectivities — some of the "private visions" and "careerist goals" — of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of "documentary endeavors," including those carried out both (and often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Despite their substantial contributions to documentary praxis in the 1940s, these individuals have largely been ignored, including by the few scholars who have touched upon Huston's famous Let There Be Light, the production of which relied heavily upon the input and authority of four men: George S. Goldman, the psychiatrist who oversaw the military's multipronged development of "psychiatric documentaries"; M. Ralph Kaufman, a psychiatrist who had developed (and filmed) hypnosis techniques for the treatment of those traumatized in the Battle of Okinawa, and who was a member of the teaching staff at Mason General Hospital, where Huston's film was shot; John Spiegel, a psychiatrist who, with Roy Grinker, had advanced the use of sodium pentothal in a procedure known as "narcosynthesis"; and Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist who served as a liaison between Huston and the others, and who supervised the scriptwriting efforts of the director and his co-author, Signal Corps Captain Charles Kaufman. However illustrious, Hollywood filmmakers were hardly essential to this diagnostic and psychotherapeutic institutional enterprise, and their ideas had to be vetted by psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose presence was rapidly expanding throughout the military. The number of physicians assigned to the neuropsychiatric corps increased from thirty-five in 1941 to twenty-four hundred in 1946, and it was in this context of psychiatric expansion and experimentation that documentary and realist films began to centralize war trauma as a common yet treatable condition.
The experimental uses to which certain films were put, and their shifting meanings in the treatment of the combat-traumatized, recall Nathan Hale Jr.'s description of World War I as a "human laboratory" that "gave psychiatrists a new sense of mission and an expanded social role." By World War II, this social role had come to encompass new duties associated with documentary film production, distribution, and exhibition. The military psychiatrist did not, however, enjoy anything like the privilege of final cut. In most cases, he was subordinate to the chief of the medical service, who, while not a psychiatrist, was often called upon to approve scripts about war trauma. There is no evidence to suggest that any such chief actually rejected or even tweaked film scripts, but some were known to be "entirely uninformed or even antagonistic to psychiatry," and their mediating function was, at the very least, an odious source of delays for many psychiatrists eager to see their efforts translated from script to screen and disseminated to audiences. Such efforts helped to ensure, as psychiatrist William C. Menninger suggested, "wider acceptance and better understanding of psychiatry," making war trauma and its treatment "evident to the layman."
From the initial "narrow assumption that almost any type or degree of neurotic disturbance was a counter-indication for military service" to the later embrace of psychiatric treatment for active-duty soldiers, "psychiatrists' approach to military problems broadened during and, particularly, since the war," in the words of one former military psychiatrist who, looking back on his work, stressed how psychiatric concepts "were expanded in several major respects," including through the pedagogic and therapeutic use of documentary film. "We psychiatrists are primarily doctors," said Air Forces psychiatrist John M. Murray in 1947, noting that, throughout World War II, "we were called upon to perform many auxiliary and secondary functions," not only supervising and participating in the production of documentaries but also contributing to debates about the potentially deleterious effects of Hollywood films that, through various fictive devices, "distorted" military psychiatry. "World War II was a key point in the history of American psychoanalysis," argues Jonathan Michel Metzl; it "allowed for the first demonstrated 'success' in the treatment of neurotic symptoms in noninstitutional settings" such as the camps and convalescent centers near the North African front lines where Grinker and Spiegel administered "interactive" drug therapies, or the soundstages on which their psychiatric disciples made reenactment a central technique in military documentaries about war trauma — a way of "reviving" the recent past for therapeutic and filmic purposes.
The rhetoric of visibility and invisibility would inform the work of psychological experts throughout the postwar period. The clinical psychologist John Watkins, for instance, would dedicate his 1949 casebook Hypnotherapy of War Neuroses "to the many veterans whose wounds, though real, are invisible," but his efforts were frequently coopted by filmmakers eager to visualize war trauma. Watkins' wartime work at the Welch Convalescent Hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida, which involved exhorting hypnotized patients to imagine "a large movie screen" on which to unfold various fantasy scenarios, was occasionally filmed in order to be studied (and, of course, duplicated at other facilities), its commitment to "the inner unconscious content of the patient's emotional life" nevertheless constituting an object of visual documentation. Set during World War II, the service comedy Imitation General (George Marshall, 1958) reflects this historical development, as a traumatized soldier (who's "really in terrible shape" and "ought to be in a hospital") confesses that "what's wrong" with him "is nothing you can see": "I think it must be what they call combat fatigue." Adding "You know what it is — you've seen it," the soldier points to a paradox that military documentaries were increasingly designed to manage — that of the sheer invisibility of a "mental disease" that cinema alone promised to make visible and knowable. "I can't find a scratch on him!" complains a hospital corpsman of one of his traumatized charges in the Navy's The N.P. Patient (1944); the film proceeds to "visualize" neuroses through the "psychodramatic," proto-Method acting of both experienced and nonprofessional performers. Using animation to indicate how the scars of tuberculosis may be seen via X-rays, the Army's Shades of Gray (1947) suggests that "psychiatric disturbances" are equally invisible to the naked eye, requiring the intervention of documentary film, which promises a "deeper understanding" of mental health, in order to achieve intelligibility.
Shorts and features about unseen "matters of the mind" reliably contributed to the American documentary tradition that Jonathan Kahana has identified with the term "intelligence work," "making visible the invisible or 'phantom' realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name power is exercised and contested." Following a period of medical uncertainty and official suppression, such films quickly became key mediators among multiple, at times competing systems of knowledge, lending trauma — especially war trauma — an audiovisual coherence made widely accessible via an abundance of state and private film distribution organs. That the identification and treatment of trauma continued to be characterized by professional disputes did not diminish but, rather, enhanced the documentary legitimacy of associated films. As Kahana argues, progressive documentary in the 1930s and 1940s tended to tackle that which was "not yet frozen in an established idea, position, or institution," even as it promised to concretize various complex political, medical, and sociological concepts.
While it may seem paradoxical to align military-sponsored films with the progressive frameworks that Kahana explores, to polarize the two categories is to fail to recognize important formal as well as ideological continuities. As Alice Lovejoy argues, the state is necessarily multifaceted, the military often "at the vanguard not only of media technology but also of media aesthetics" — a "laboratory for film form and language," "a pioneer in cinema's applications and institutions." By the 1940s, American military filmmakers were, to varying degrees, familiar with the writings of documentary critics John Grierson and Paul Rotha, and their ranks included (at least for a time) the Dutch socialist Joris Ivens, who worked for the Army Signal Corps. State documentary remained, in this period, distinctly amenable to experimentation — at times rooted in actual clinical practice — while simultaneously offering, as Kahana puts it, "a means for grounding political abstractions like state, party, movement, and nation in the apparently natural formation of the American people." Psychological traumas and their exploratory treatment constituted ripe terrain for documentary — a word that was widely used in this period, including to refer to "mere" military films made in a variety of styles. Take, for instance, a single 1944 issue of the trade paper Motion Picture Herald, which offered no fewer than ten uses of the term to describe military-sponsored films, at one point carefully explaining that William Wyler's The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) — a production of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit — is more than a simple "aviation report," and is in fact a "war documentary." This liberal application of "documentary" extended even to military films that weren't made by Oscar-winning directors like Wyler — that, in fact, arrived as anonymous accounts of various mundane activities, or that, like many a dramatic treatment of trauma and psychotherapy, suggested the carefully staged action of a Hollywood studio production. Taking their cues from the military as well as from the widely circulated work of Grierson and Rotha, Motion Picture Herald and other publications regularly employed the term "dramatic documentary" throughout the war, echoing its use among psychiatrists and other psychological experts who believed that trauma could best be addressed via reenactment and other theatrical, even fantasmatic techniques.
"The most misunderstood of all human ills are those due to problems of the mind," reads the opening crawl of the 1944 documentary The Inside Story of Seaman Jones. "It is, of course, impossible to fully cover this subject in any single book or picture, but this presentation, made for you, endeavors to clarify the most common, fundamental troubles that beset us as a result of emotional upset." Produced by Paramount Pictures as a Coast Guard training film, and based, in part, on psychiatrist Robert H. Felix's work at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones would soon become one of the most widely distributed of all military documentaries made during World War II, its depiction of "emotional disturbances" at once responsive to the unique realities of armed service and potentially relevant to individuals in all walks — and at virtually all stages — of life. As its official distributor, the Navy remained committed, for over two decades, to ensuring the film's broad circulation as both an instrument of instruction and a source of therapy. In short, The Inside Story of Seaman Jones was thought to be good publicity for the military, especially as the United States (like the film's young male subject) entered a new "life phase" — a postwar period of global leadership. By 1946, with the film reaching members of all branches of the armed forces as well as secondary schools, businesses, churches, and community centers nationwide, its opening address to the viewer could easily be recast as capacious in the extreme, the words "made for you" addressed as much to students in the classroom as to workers in the factory.
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Excerpted from "Traumatic Imprints"
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