War neurosis, adjustment problems in veterans, and an 111 nation: The disciplinary project of American psychiatry during and after world war II

Osiris

Volumn 22, Issue , 2007, Pages 72-92

  Pols, Hans ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADJUSTMENT DISORDER; ARTICLE; FEMALE; HISTORY; HUMAN; MALE; MOTHER; POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER; PSYCHIATRY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOLDIER; UNITED STATES; VETERAN; WAR;

ADJUSTMENT DISORDERS; COMBAT DISORDERS; FEMALE; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MALE; MILITARY PERSONNEL; MOTHERS; PSYCHIATRY; UNITED STATES; VETERANS; WORLD WAR II;

EID: 35348885675     PISSN: 03697827     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/521743     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (videorecording), screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, directed by William Wyler, presented by Samuel Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif., MGM Home Entertainment, 2000 [1946]. In the original script for this Oscarwinning movie about the predicament of returning ex-servicemen, the character of Homer Parrish, the third man on the plane, was that of a veteran suffering from shell shock. In the final version, Parrish was a double amputee, a role played by real veteran (and amputee) Harold Russell. For an analysis of this film and other "reintegration dramas," see David A. Gerber, "Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of DisabledVeterans of World War II in The Best Years of Our Lives," in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000);
2. and Sonya Michel, "Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films," in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
3. G. Brock Chisholm, "The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society" (William. Alanson White Memorial Lectures), Psychiatry 9 (1946): 3-20, on 19.
4. For Chisholm, see Allan Irving, Brock Chisholm: Doctor to the World (Markham, Ontario, 1998).
5. For overviews of the involvement of American psychiatry with the armed forces during World War II, see Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), chap. 4,
6. "Nervous in the Service"; Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (London, 2000);
7. Hans Binnenveld, From Shellshock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry (Amsterdam, 1997);
8. and Edgar Jones and Simon Wesseley, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War, Maudsley Monographs 47 (New York, 2005);
9. Paul Wanke, "American Military Psychiatry and Its Role among Ground Forces in World War II," Journal of Military History 63 (1999): 127-46.
10. For an overview of psychiatric ideas in the 1930s, with an. emphasis on mental hygiene, see Hans Pols, "Divergences in American Psychiatry during the Depression: Somatic Psychiatry, Community Mental Hygiene, and Social Reconstruction," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37 (2001): 369-88.
11. For the history of somatic psychiatry before World War II, see Joel T. Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
12. Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York, 1997);
13. and Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (New York, 1998).
14. For an overview of these initiatives, see Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
15. Theresa Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada (Albany, N.Y, 1989);
16. and Elizabeth Limbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
17. See, e.g., Pols, "Divergences in American Psychiatry" (cit. n. 4).
18. Herman, Romance of American Psychology (cit. n. 3), 22.
19. For an overview, see Albert Deutsch, "Military Psychiatry: World War II," in One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry, ed. J. K. Hall (New York, 1944);
20. Harry Stack Sullivan, "Psychiatry and the National Defense," Psychiatry 4 (1941): 201-17;
21. and [Sullivan], "Selective Service Psychiatry," Psychiatry 4 (1941): 440-66.
22. See, e.g., William C. Porter, "Military Psychiatry and the Selective Service," War Medicine 1 (1941): 364-71 ;
23. and other articles in the special issue on psychiatric aspects of military medicine published in the second issue of War Medicine in 1941.
24. Harry Stack Sullivan, "Mental Hygiene and National Defense: A Year of Selective-Service Psychiatry," Mental Hygiene 26 (1942): 7-14;
25. Sullivan, "Psychiatry and the National Defense" (cit. n. 9).
26. Roy D. Halloran and Malcolm. J. Farrell, "The Function of Neuropsychiatry in the Army," American Journal of Psychiatry 100 (1943): 14-20, on 17.
27. Roy D. Halloran and Paul I. Yakovlev, Military Neuropsychiatry, vol. 7 of Postgraduate Seminar in Neurology and Psychiatry (Waltham, Mass., 1942);
28. Halloran and Farrell, "Function of Neuropsychiatry in the Army" (cit. n. 12);
29. Roy D. Halloran (chairman), "Proceedings of the Military Session of the American Society for Research in Psychosomatic Medicine on the Unfit: How to Exclude Them and How to Use Them," Psychosomatic Medicine 5 (1943): 323-63.
30. In this respect, an analysis of the situation by military officials and the aspirations of a number of psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists converged. For the military perspective on the incidence of war neuroses, see Elliot Duncan Cooke, All But Me and Thee: Psychiatry at the Foxhole Level (Washington, D.C., 1946). The chapters of this book had been previously published in the Infantry Journal.
31. WilliamC. Porter, "The School of Military Neuropsychiatry," Amer. J. Psychiatry 100 (1943): 25-7.
32. Roy Grinker had been in analysis with Sigmund Freud under a stipend of the Rockefeller Foundation. For his career, see Daniel Offer and Daniel X. Freedman, Modern Psychiatry and Clinical Research: Essays in Honor of Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (New York, 1972).
33. For an excellent overview of the role of psychoanalysts during and. after World War II, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985: The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States (New York, 1995), chap. 11, "World War II: Psychoanalytic Warriors and Theories."
34. Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses (Philadelphia, 1945), 93.
35. This book had been published as a confidential document in 1943 as Roy Grinker and John P. Spiegel, War Neuroses in North Africa: The Tunisian Campaign (New York, 1943).
36. Ibid., 115.
37. Malcolm J. Farrell and John. W. Appel, "Current Trends in Military Neuropsychiatry," Amer. J. Psychiatry 101 (1944): 12-19, on 19.
38. The stress concept became more important in Grinker and Spiegel's reinterpretation of their war experiences in Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, Men under Stress (Philadelphia, 1945).
39. According to Russell Viner, this work was instrumental in. making the stress concept generally known in the medical profession. See Russell Viner, "Putting Stress in Life: Hans Selye and the Making of Stress Theory," Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 391-410.
40. See the chapter on treatment in Grinker and. Spiegel, War Neuroses (cit. n. 17), 75-114.
41. Ibid., 82.
42. Frederick Hanson, ed., Combat Psychiatry: Experiences in the North African and Mediterranean Theaters of Operation, American Ground Forces, World War II (Honolulu, 2005), originally published in Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department 9, suppl. (Nov. 1949).
43. Deutsch, "Military Psychiatry" (cit. n. 9).
44. Leo H. Bartemeier et al., "Combat Exhaustion," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104 (1946): 358-89,489-525.
45. Normal Q. Brill, Mildred C. Tate, and William. C. Menninger, "Enlisted Men Discharged from the Army Because of Psychoneurosis: A Follow-up Study," Journal of the American Medical Association 128, 30 June 1945, 633-7;
46. Normal Q. Brill and Gilbert W. Beebe, A Follow-up Study of War Neuroses (Washington, D.C., 1955).
47. Edward A. Strecker, "Presidential Address," Amer. J. Psychiatry 101(1) (1944): 1-8, on 1.
48. Edwin G. Boring and Marjorie Van de Water, Psychology for the Fighting Man: Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself (Washington, D.C., 1943).
49. Herbert X. Spiegel, "Silver Linings in the Clouds of War: A Five-Decade Retrospective," in American Psychiatry after World War II, ed. Roy W. Menninger and John C. Nemiah (Washington, D.C., 2000);
50. Spiegel, interview with author, New York City, 19 March 1997.
51. Herbert X. Spiegel, "Preventive Psychiatry with Combat Troops," Amer. J. Psychiatry 101 (1944): 310-5.
52. Samuel A. Stoufferet al., The American Soldier: Adjustment during Army Life, vol. 1 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton, N.J., 1949);
53. Stoufferet al., The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, vol. 2 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II;
54. Carl I. Hovland, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, and Fred D. Sheffield. The American Soldier: Experiments on Mass Communication, vol. 3 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II;
55. Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Measurement and Prediction, vol. 4 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II.
56. These findings indicate a general disenchantment with the war among the majority of soldiers, which was mostly forgotten after the war, when. American society attempted to construct memories of valor and sacrifice about the just and glorious war. Recently, historians have embarked on a reappraisal of World War II, in which the attitudes expressed by American soldiers appear less surprising. See Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York, 1989);
57. Fussel, The Boys ' Crusade: American GIs in Europe - Chaos and Fear in World War Two (London, 2003) ;
58. and Richard Polenberg, "The Good War? A Reappraisal of How World War II Affected American Society," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992): 295-322.
59. Eight-balls (later, "odd-balls") refers to a Section 8 discharge ("unsuitable for Army service"); NP to "discharged because of neuropsychiatrie reasons."
60. Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 222-36.
61. See, e.g., "The Neutral Soldiers," Common Sense 14(10) (1945): 25-6, providing the account of a soldier who received a neuropsychiatrie discharge because he could not stand army culture.
62. Edgar L. Jones, "One War Is Enough," Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1946, 48-53.
63. Ellen Dwyer, "Psychiatry and Race during World War II," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61 (2006): 117-43.
64. Dorothy Paull, "Psychiatric Rehabilitation of Rejectees and Men Discharged from the Armed Forces: The Wisconsin Service for Rejectees," Mental Hygiene 29 (1945): 248-54.
65. Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York, 1944), 5. This was not the only book bringing the veteran problem, to the attention of the American public.
66. See also Dixon Werter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Cambridge, Mass., 1944).
67. Waller, Veteran Comes Back (cit. n. 38), 13.
68. Ibid., 169.
69. Ibid., 55.
70. See also Willard Waller, "Why Veterans Are Bitter," American Mercury 61 (Aug. 1945): 147-54;
71. Waller, "The Veteran's Attitudes," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 238 (March 1945): 174-9.
72. See, e.g., Agnes E. Meyer, "The Veterans Say - or Else!" Collier's 118,12 Oct. 1946, 16, 17, 1159;
73. Cristopher La Farge, "Soldier into Civilian," Harper's Magazine 190 (March 1945): 339-46.
74. Irvin L. Child and Marjorie Van de Water, Psychology for the Returning Serviceman (Washington, D.C, 1945).
75. Directed also at returning soldiers were Dorothy W. Baruch and Lee Edward Travis, You 're out of the Service Now: The Veteran's Guide to Civilian Life (New York, 1946);
76. Maxwell Droke, Good-by to GI: How to Be a Successful Civilian (New York, 1945);
77. Benjamin C. Bowker, Out of Uniform (New York, 1946);
78. Leo M. Cherne, The Rest'ofYour Life (Garden City, N. Y., 1944).
79. There is some analysis of this genre. See, e.g., Sonya Michel, "American. Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 154-67.
80. Willard Waller, "What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran," Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1945, 26, 27,92-8, on 26 and 95.
81. See, e.g., Thomas A. C. Rennie and Luther E. Woodward, When He Comes Back; If He Comes Back Nervous: Two Talks to Families of Returning Servicemen (New York, 1944);
82. Alexander G. Dumas and Grace Keen, A Psychiatric Primer for the Veteran's Family and Friends (Minneapolis, Minn., 1945);
83. Herbert I. Kupper, Back to Life: The Emotional Adjustment of Our Veterans (New York, 1945).
84. For articles in. the popular press, see Carl R. Rogers, "Wartime Issues in. Family Counseling," Journal of Home Economics 36 (Sept. 1944): 390-3;
85. and Norman Q. Brill, "Veterans with Problems," Journal of Home Economics 38 (June 1946): 325-8.
86. George K. Pratt, Soldier to Civilian: Problems of Readjustment (New York, 1944).
87. For a case history from Pratt's Soldier to Civilian, in which a veteran survived a mortar attack well, only to succumb to the pressures of his parents, see Hans Pols, 'The Repression of War Trauma in American Psychiatry after World War II," in Medicine and Modern Warfare, ed. Roger Cooter, Mark. Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (Amsterdam, 1999), 251-76, at 264-5.
88. Robert J. Havighurst et al., The American Veteran Back Home: A Study of Veteran Readjustment (New York, 1951), 74. Similar observations were made by journalists and casual observers.
89. Walter R. Goetsch, "The G.I. in Civvies," School and Society, 21 July 1945, 45-6, on 45.
90. Bowker, Out of Uniform (cit. n. 43), 25.
91. Charles G. Bolte, The New Veteran (New York, 1945), 2. The American Veterans Committee aimed to be an alternative veterans organization apart from the American Legion, and was motivated by left-wing political ideals.
92. Ibid.
93. "No One Speaks for the GI," Common Sense 14 (1945): 27-8, on 28.
94. Bowker, Out of Uniform (cit. n. 43), 32.
95. Ibid., 34.
96. Kupper, Back to Life (cit. n. 46), 19;
97. Bolte, New Veteran (cit. n. 52), 6.
98. Bolte, New Veteran (cit. n. 52), 108.
99. Ibid., 140;
100. Ralph Peterson, "Problems in Reconversion [Review of Soldierto Civilian]," Saturday Review of Literature 28,13 Jan. 1945,12.
101. Drake, Good-by to G.I. (cit. n. 43), 44.
102. William. Best, "They Won't All Be Psychoneurotics," Saturday Evening Post 216, 14 April 1945, 112.
103. Kupper, Back to Life (cit. n. 46), 20.
104. Best, "They Won't All Be Psychoneurotics" (cit. n. 61), 112.
105. Morton Thompson, How to Be a Civilian (Garden City, N.Y., 1946), 37, 40, 41, 75.
106. Ibid., 31-2.
107. Ibid., 76.
108. David Dempsey, "Veterans Are Not Problem Children," American Mercury, Sept. 1945, 326-31, on 326.
109. Don Wharton, "The Veteran Is No Problem. Child," Common Sense 14 (1945): 17-18, on 17.
110. Kupper, Back to Life (cit. n. 46), 19.
111. Dempsey, "Veterans Are Not Problem Children." (cit. n. 67), 331.
112. Gerald N. Grob, "The Forging of Mental Health Policy in America: World War II to New Frontier," J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci. 42 (1987): 410-46;
113. Rebecca Jo Plant, "William Menninger and American Psychoanalysis, 1946-1948," History of Psychiatry 16 (2005): 181-202.
114. William C. Menninger, "Psychiatric Experience in the War, 1941-1946," Amer. J. Psychiatry 103 (1947): 577-86, 578.
115. Edward A. Strecker, Their Mothers' Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia, 1946).
116. The most important chapters of this book also appeared in the conservative Saturday Evening Post as Strecker, "What's Wrong with American Mothers ?" Saturday Evening Post 219, 26 Oct. 1946,14-5, 85-104.
117. These thoughts were initially expressed in Strecker, "Psychiatry Speaks Democracy," Mental Hygiene 29 (1945): 591-605, which was based on a lecture given April 27, 1945.
118. Strecker's use of the phrase "Mom" was, as he acknowledged, derived from the strongly misogynistic Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers (New York, 1942).
119. Strecker, Their Mothers'Sons (cit. n. 73), 15, 14.
120. Ibid., 31.
121. The gendered metaphors are almost too obvious to point out. For the equation of femininity with fluidity, fluids, floods, and water, see Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis, Minn., 1987).
122. Strecker, Their Mothers'Sons (cit. n. 73), 18.
123. Ibid., 36.
124. Ibid., 17.
125. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988);
126. Fred Matthews, "The Utopia of Human Relations: The Conflict-Free Family in American Social Thought, 1930-1960," Journal for the History of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 24 (1983): 343-62.
127. The first edition of Benjamin Spock's famous child-rearing book was published in 1946: Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York, 1946).
128. For an analysis of the presence of Dr. Spock's manual in American families, see Nancy Pottishman Weiss, "Mother, the Invention of Necessity: Dr. Benjamin Spock's Care for Infant and Child," in Growing up in America: Children in Historical Perspective, ed. N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes (Urbana, 111., 1985).
129. See also Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds., "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1998), 519-46.
130. Theodore W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950);
131. John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, Conn., 1939).
132. David Riesman. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, Conn., 1950);
133. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York, 1955).
134. See also Hans Pols, "Anomie in the Metropolis: The City in American Sociology and Psychiatry," Science and the City, Osiris 18 (2003): 194-211.
135. The Best Years of Our Lives (cit. n. 1).