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of the permanent war economy and of the military-industrial state more broadly.¹¹⁸ In doing its part to normalize psychotherapy, the military was thus attempting to naturalize its own ascendance as an agent of massive transformations both at home and abroad.

      By insisting on the ideological labor that nontheatrical nonfiction films were called upon to perform as pedagogic and therapeutic agents of the military-industrial state, I hope to move away from what Foucault called “this sacralising modesty that insists on denying that psychoanalysis has anything to do with normalization.”¹¹⁹ Psychotherapy is as much an instrument of state power as a mechanism of social control, and its initial appearance in military documentaries must be understood as such. This complex institutional role was neither inevitable nor easily won, however. It grew out of complex negotiations among government agencies, military psychiatrists, and civilian organizations concerned about how best to communicate to the general public the scale of the country’s “psychological problem.” In response to questions about the loss of military manpower through unprecedentedly high rates of “neuropsychiatric rejection,” the War Department elected to impose a “publicity blackout” in 1943. Lasting until the spring of the following year, the blackout was intended to limit public knowledge of “mental illness among soldiers,” but it was stymied by frequent leaks to the press—including to the Washington Post, which reported (accurately if with colloquial abandon) that the percentage of rejections due to “crackups” was significantly higher than in World War I.¹²⁰

      The blackout was therefore largely ineffective, failing to prevent, for instance, the radio program The March of Time from broadcasting, in the spring of 1944, a pair of special reports by the Surgeon General and the director of the Army’s Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division.¹²¹ It would, in any event, be naïve to assume the efficacy of any measure designed to limit trauma’s intelligibility in the early 1940s. Exhibited in commercial theaters across the country, MGM’s short film The Woman in the House (Sammy Lee, 1942), an entry in the series John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade (1938–1949), opens with images of global war—from panicked populations besieged by bombs to traumatized Americans suffering from “night terrors”—and argues that, because of the war, “we have all come to know the meaning of fear as never before.” Luckily, however, psychiatry provides a reason to hold out hope for humanity: “Because we are all afraid of something, a new science has sprung up which attempts to treat fear as a disease.” This “new science of psychiatry” is, we are told, rooted in the horrors of war; “one of history’s worst moments” is thus one of the best for psychiatry, which flourishes in such “troubled times.” The film goes on to depict a “victim of fear” (played by Ann Richards) who is traumatized by news of her fiancé’s death in combat, and it concludes with an awkward expression of gratitude to war trauma for “generating” so widely useful a profession as psychiatry. Similar arguments were offered in widely read publications of the period, including J. R. Rees’ The Shaping of Psychiatry by War (1945).¹²² Though marred by outmoded nomenclature and speculation regarding the role of carbon monoxide in the development of “shell shock,” Norman C. Meier’s 1943 book Military Psychology further introduced war trauma to a broad readership, arguing that it “may affect almost anyone.”¹²³ Even Eleanor Roosevelt, writing in her newspaper column in the fall of 1942, emphasized the importance of giving each draftee “a sufficiently careful psychiatric examination.”¹²⁴ At the time, notes Alison Winter, “there were fears that as many as half the troops might ultimately be lost to psychiatric problems,” making the subject of war trauma difficult to avoid in American everyday life.¹²⁵

      Despite considerable pressure from the American Psychiatric Association to make pertinent information more widely available, the War Department remained committed, for a period of several months, to limiting public as well as institutional knowledge of psychoneurosis. This meant placing a moratorium on the Psychiatric Film Program recently established under the leadership of military psychiatrist George S. Goldman at the Office of the Surgeon General, which had yielded the Army documentary Combat Exhaustion in 1943.¹²⁶ Nevertheless, British documentary imports (particularly Neuropsychiatry 1943 [Michael Hankinson, 1943], which insists that military psychiatry will “benefit not only the individual but also the society in which he lives”) were widely screened in military settings prior to and during the blackout. In an indication of British influence on the development of the Psychiatric Film Program, the American military psychiatrists Lloyd J. Thompson, Ernest Parsons, and Jackson Thomas had made Combat Exhaustion at the 312th Station Psychiatric Hospital in England; when they returned to the United States, however, their film was virtually alone among American-made works that purported to teach psychiatric techniques, at least until the blackout was finally lifted in the spring of 1944.

      Given the sheer impossibility of limiting public knowledge of the astonishingly high incidence of psychiatric cases in all branches of the armed forces, the War Department eventually pivoted toward an embrace of film’s utility as a psychotherapeutic vehicle of public relations—a means not of denying the prevalence of trauma among American men but rather of convincing audiences of the military’s capacity to treat and even prevent the condition. At least one of the military’s own public relations specialists was discharged on the basis of a psychiatric disorder: Mike Gorman, who suffered from anxiety, anorexia, and insomnia, later became a renowned mental health lobbyist, pushing for the continued application of military-psychiatric lessons to all Americans, including through film.¹²⁷ Addressing the Army’s belated production and distribution of “psychiatric documentaries,” one psychiatric advisor noted that, in order to counteract any alarmism caused by the abovementioned leaks (and by general press coverage of the military’s “psychiatric problem”), “it was necessary that each film perform as many functions and reach as wide an audience as possible.”¹²⁸ The publicity blackout did succeed in obscuring certain statistics and suppressing some carefully prepared documents—including a fact sheet entitled “The Mental Health of the U.S. Soldier,” which was intended to assure “the woman in the home” that the men fighting for her protection were not, in fact, all “mental cases.”¹²⁹ By 1945, however, the official message had changed. The War Department’s goal was no longer to trumpet the mental health of all servicemen—that would have been impossible in light of revelations about discharge rates—but instead to normalize trauma, including and especially through film, adopting a confessional mode as the intimate scaffolding on which to build bold claims about military-psychiatric treatment and its implications for American power in the postwar world.

      This new policy—one of “absolute frankness and honesty about the total situation”—required careful management.¹³⁰ In the fall of 1944, an investigation by the Army’s Inspector General had led to the recommendation that the military’s Bureau of Public Relations “assign a full-time public relations officer to handle the planning and execution of a program relative to publicity and public education of psychiatry in the Army.”¹³¹ That the recommendation was never followed speaks, in part, to the importance increasingly attached to film as a vehicle of public relations, for no one official could possibly be expected to oversee the promiscuous circulation of documentaries whose purpose was explicitly to “spread knowledge.”¹³² As Winter points out, military documentaries “were sometimes the primary form of enculturation that turned doctors from other specialties into rough-and-ready psychiatric practitioners,” but they were also part of a “liberal policy of public education” that demanded their use in schools, factories, and a variety of other nontheatrical, nonmilitary locations.¹³³ Refining this policy in the early months of 1945, the Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division, rejecting the premise behind the earlier blackout, argued that “full publicity of the psychiatric problem should be given in a factual manner,” with “factual” here signifying a certain documentary ideal.¹³⁴ Films about the military’s “psychiatric problem” thus provided the occasion for debates about the nature and limits of documentary realism.

      Discursively, psychiatric treatment, with its emphasis on individual minds, was often deployed as a useful rejoinder to the perceived regimentation and “mindlessness” of fascist fighting forces. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, for instance, argued that American servicemen undergoing treatment stood

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