This is a short post as a statement of a larger project that I am developing that I have made brief reference to in other posts – to look at the ways in which Hollywood portrayed the clinic in the fifteen year period immediately after the war that were pivotal in making psychology an everyday concern. US films fitted into a postwar optimism surrounding mental health treatment that was manifest in the expansions made to services with the establishment of health acts immediately after war in the allied nations. This was seen most dramatically in the US, which had passed an ambitious mental health act in 1946, but also the UK – although mental services were part of the larger overhaul of the British health services, the National Association of Mental Health had been set up to unify the psychiatric social work bodies that had cropped up during the first half of the century. This fifteen year period saw a huge rise in the number of films that featured psychologists, their ideas and the treatments, and functioned to popularise and spread the view that psychiatry was, all in all, a force for good that held massive potential to improve society.
The moves were connected to wider political notions of the role psychiatry could play in preventing another rise of racism, another world war, and another genocide in Europe. It is obviously not as simple as all screenwriters saying ‘yay psychiatry!’ – they were aware of the abuses of the profession under Nazidom and some of the emerging stories of forced physical treatments including lobotomies and sterilisation in both Europe, the USSR and the US. At the same time, there was an enthusiasm about the ways that psychiatric treatment could prevent reactionary behaviour that would translate itself into political action supporting demagogues and extreme ideologies – the hope was that more humane treatment would allow ourselves to understand ourselves better, becoming more mature social beings that would make sensible life to help increase our participation in civil society.
Given the Hollywood blacklist and the crack down on dissenting voices, criticisms of consumerist capitalist society were often channelled through depictions of psychiatry and medicine. Wider concerns that defined the fifties are frequently expressed through the depiction of anxiety and breakdowns of the mind and body. Mental disorder came to be quickly associated by scriptwriters to the pressures of an individualistic society, paranoia over communist take over and the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction. Psychoanalysis’s view of agency – that conscious choice is often undermined and determined by unconscious drives – came to be relied upon to help make sense of the place of the individual in relation to these wider pressures, which were portrayed as too complex for one person to change. Instead, discontent and anxiety should be directed inwards – with the aid of the psychiatrist, a form of self understanding could be achieved that would allow a coping with these everyday pressures. The anxieties could be explained through proper treatment that allowed an understanding of unconscious drives. The paternalistic faith in the powers of the authorities to restore functionality is often represented through psychologists and medical men, but not through then popular treatments like insulin coma therapy, lobotomies and treatment in an asylum. Wrong-doing is frequently connected to illness that is to some degree linked to wider social and political matters, but they are not irretrievably biologically damaged, and it is through the talking cure of the psychiatrist that breakthroughs can be made.
The representation of mental disorder in film attracts the interest of scholars from a number of areas. Psychologists frequently write works which make value judgments on the accuracy and worth of the representations in popular media in stigmatising mental health disorders, or opening up dialogue. The ways in which gender shapes depictions of mental disorder in popular media is frequently written about by scholars from media, film and cultural studies. Through assessing the reception of these works, important assessments of the role that popular media plays in shaping attitudes towards mental health are made. A lot of work has been devoted to both the representation of mental disorder in film, and some writers have touched upon films from this period, including the Three Faces of Eve and Lizzie – how can more work on this period and topic be justified?
Although this is not strictly a piece of film history, the goal of my research as a historian of psychiatry is to explore the social and political reasons behind the turn towards depicting psychology in film in the fifteen years immediately following the war: in characters who are psychologists, in setting scenes and sometimes entire films in psychiatric clinics, using mental disorder as a way of explaining morally wrong behaviour, to the use of psychiatric treatment as a plot device that brings about redemption, and the ways that the lingo of the professions is introduced into film. Certain genres of the time were more suited to representing psychological turmoil than others: since they were often set in contemporary life, noirs, melodramas, teen films and neo-realist dramas were well equipped to represent mental disorder and create a view of psychological treatment that was rooted in the everyday but in certain crucial ways was also an aspirational one, that may have been shaped by exchanges with psychiatrists who acted as advisors to Hollywood.
This leads me to focus on self conscious depictions of psychiatry in film between 1945 and 1960. This seems to take three forms: the representations of the psychiatric clinic, the use of psychiatric concepts and the depiction of psychiatric treatments. I am interested in how asylums and the newer clinics that developed in the wake of the National Mental Health Act are portrayed, and how scriptwriters parsed psychiatric terms – these are for the main Freudian psychoanalytic terms during this period, with terms like schizophrenia and mania introduced at times. The treatments are psychoanalytic as well for the most part, although lobotomies and asylum internment are represented, usually in an unfavourable light. Clinics are usually depicted positively as placed were effective treatment and recuperation takes place, but again this is not uniform and the older asylums are frequently portrayed. I am less interested in the link between madness and evil, a frequent trope of the screen – although some have claimed that psychopathy and anti-social behaviour are depicted in fifties horror, I actually don’t think that many scriptwriters themselves thought they were portraying a mental condition that needed treatment, and instead believed they were portraying morally corrupt personalities that needed to be restricted by the law.
Kevin Matthew Jones 