Managing the Trauma of Labor

Abstract

This chapter, by Kaia Scott, discusses the U.S. military’s use of film to deploy psychiatric ideas and treatment techniques throughout all levels of personnel during the Second World War. It describes military psychiatric films that were shown to teach soldiers, officers, and doctors psychiatric monitoring and management techniques and also films that were used as medical tools in the therapeutic treatment of soldiers on a mass scale. The use of film to promote military psychiatry as a strategy for making manpower more efficient is contextualized within changes occurring in psychiatry during the interwar and postwar period. The chapter shows that the military’s use of media to destigmatize psychiatric ideas in an attempt to optimize the labor of “normal” persons converged with and greatly amplified particular trends in the psychiatric discipline by putting enormous institutional resources behind them.