The Sad Sacks

Psychiatry rushed into World War II as a bumptious big-talking rookie, then turned out to be the Sad Sack of military medicine. This is the verdict of two ex-majors among the 2,400 psychiatrists who served in the U.S. Army.

When the war began, admits Dr. Meyer Maskin of New York in the current issue of Psychiatry, "psychiatrists were both pretentious and ingenuous in their claims." The war taught them a new humility. Confesses Maskin: "Psychiatry has little or nothing to offer to surcharging men to fight or to persist indefinitely in the anxiety frustration and monotony of contemporary wars. It has developed no effective field method" for cutting down neuroses.

In combat as a divisional psychiatrist, Dr. Maskin found that the time-consuming techniques of psychiatry had no place amid the rush of war. The psychiatrist had to improvise rules of thumb, apply them quickly and uncritically. He made enormous concessions to the basic military problem of cowardice and took a hardhearted view of most soldiers who complained of "nervousness." In fact he discovered that some neuroses are perhaps desirable. "Resentment can be a militarily useful frame of mind despite its personal painfulness. Frustrate and goad a man sufficiently and he will become indifferent to his own fate and ignore his . . . abhorrence of rage and slaughter."

Eight Balls. Dr. Claude Uhler of Dallas spent most of the war attached to an outfit of "eight balls," chronic misfits who had sifted down to the unexacting job of guard at a P.W. camp in the U.S. Thirty percent of them should have been discharged as unfit for any kind of duty, wrote Uhler in the A.M.A. Journal. They were kept in service by the Army's evasive psychiatric procedures by which a precise diagnosis was avoided in favor of mere description and paraphrase. Results: "More than one-half million misfits carried along for an indefinite period of six months to three years [and] the perpetuation of mental disease in thousands of genuinely disabled men."

The Army's top psychiatrist, Brigadier General William C. Menninger, hit the ceiling when he read Dr. Uhler's charges, retorted last week in the A.M.A. Journal that Dr. Uhler himself "lacked the capacity to adjust"--i.e., must have been an eight ball. U.S. psychiatrists got ready to debate their own claims and pretensions as well as their Army gripes.

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