The Military, Psychiatry, and "Unfit" Soldiers, 1939 1942

Abstract

This article examines the psychiatric screening of U.S. soldiers during the Second World War, established by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), as a key moment in the public application of clinical psychiatry, as well as a turning point in Sullivan's intellectual and professional career. After a brief look at the ideas and expectations Sullivan brought to the screening system, I discuss a major problem of the screening: the mismatch between the medical concept of disease prevention and the realities of the mass screening as a public policy. As a way to highlight this mismatch, I focus on Sullivan's failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces. Despite his liberal approach to the issue of homosexuality before the war, which he had created in his clinical practice, Sullivan was unable to persuade the military and the public of gay men's right to serve the nation. The examination of how his sympathetic view of homosexuality became circumscribed reveals not only the gap between clinical insights and public policy, but also how tentative views of homosexuality in public debate among liberal psychiatrists during the decade preceding the war contributed to the failure to make non-homophobic policy in the 1940s. This article shows that the relative conservatism in the politics of sexuality among liberal psychiatrists, as well as the intransigent conservatism as seen in homophobic tradition of the Army, contributed to the discriminatory screening criteria.

The great escape: World War II, neo‐Freudianism, and the origins of U.S. psychocultural analysis

“…When he became a high‐level consultant to the U.S. Selective Service in 1940, one of his most critical tasks was to train physicians to assess selectees (Sullivan, 1941; Wake, 2007). The goal was to weed out “maladjusted” men before they ever put on a uniform.…”

A fine balance: individualism, society and the prevention of mental illness in the United States, 1945–1968

“…There were two primary reasons for this: the first was that 12 per cent of all men who volunteered for military duty were rejected on psychiatric grounds, amounting to more than a million people, six times the rejection figure for the First World War (Pols and Oak, 2007). Although historian Naoko Wake has highlighted how a considerable percentage of this figure amounted to homosexuals (which was considered a mental illness), it nonetheless suggested that far more Americans were mentally ill than previously thought (Wake, 2007). The second reason, as Jackson (2013) and others have described, was increased recognition of combat stress, highlighted in Grinker and Spiegel's study Men Under Stress (1945).…”

‘You Could Shame the Great Arthur Himself’: A Queer Reading of Lancelot from BBC’s Merlin with Respect to the Character in Malory, White, and Bradley

“…76 Men in this period who did not display suitably masculine aggressiveness were routinely accused of homosexuality 77 and were seen to pose 'unquestionable harm to "normal" soldiers.' 78 Lancelot becomes a 'surrogate character' for these desires and frustrations.…”