ROBERT MICHELS
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behavior in frameworks that distract us from moral evaluation. I suspect
that's true in many ways. In some sense, of course, psychoanalysis is part of
that tradition. However, I don't think it's the cause. Psychoanalytic theory
just doesn't lead to that kind of conclusion. However, psychoanalysis may
have become a symbol for the shift from a moral lens through which we
view the activities of others to some other kind of lens which can be used
for moral exculpation and that upsets a lot of people. They attack psycho–
analysis in a way that might be valid except what they are attacking isn't
really psychoanalysis, it is a symbol for something else.
I was at a meeting earlier today at which we were discussing the his–
tory of psychiatry in the nineteenth century. The speaker argued that
psychiatry got a very bad reputation in American medicine because psy–
chiatrists were always promising cures they never delivered, while other
physicians were more circumspect. When you look into why psychiatrists
were so optimistic in their public statements you discover something famil–
iar to us today. Psychiatric treatment has been based on public funding,
while the rest of medicine is privately funded. One obtains public funding
by claiming that more dollars will lead to wonderful social benefits-cur–
ing the sick, getting the mentally ill off the streets, etc. As psychiatrists
became skillful at the government budget appropriation game they made
more and more promises they couldn't keep. We live with the secondary
effects of that. I think that in an analogous way there was an unfortunate
early tendency to promise things that psychoanalysis might do.
During World War II American military psychiatrists were heavily
influenced by psychoanalytic thinking. Dr. Menninger was a psychoanalyst
and the chief of Army psychiatry, and psychoanalytically-informed train–
ing was seen as the most potent and scientific strategy for transforming
general physicians so they could go to the battlefield and function as psy–
chiatrists in time of war. They learned a little bit about psychoanalytic
thinking, and then went to the battlefield and saw soldiers who were in
acute mental distress due to the trauma of war. They used their newly
learned theory to treat their patients and were amazingly successful, in
great part because they were treating people with an excellent prognosis.
If persons who are acutely distressed and have had a traumatic experience
are separated from the trauma and treated nicely they will get better. These
same doctors then came back to the States excited and enthusiastic about
the power of the new psychiatric theory they had learned and eager to use
it for all kinds of psychiatric patients, including those with chronic, serious
mental illnesses. Their enthusiasm was genuine and infectious; many were
trained in this psychoanalytic dynamic psychiatry; they found ready-made
heroes in a group of brilliant European psychoanalysts who had moved
to this country just before the war. There was great excitement and enthu-
