The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (7 page)

Back in the Bay Area, near his family and closest friends, Kelley drew attention by trailblazing a type of occupational therapy that was perhaps unique in American psychiatry. He taught patients how to perform magic tricks, an activity he claimed was more effective in rehabilitating the mentally ill than many other forms of therapy. In an article for the journal
Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation
in 1940, he noted the importance of the conjurer’s intelligence and imagination in entertaining his audience, described how the mind—not the eye—is deceived, and laid out the qualities of stage magic that most attracted him: “
No other type of entertainment can be so effectively presented with so little practice. After a single lesson, one can deftly perform easy mechanical effects. Yet the feeling of success engendered by a clever act, so readily learned, stimulates the student to attempt more difficult presentations. He thus gradually develops the true skill and finesse of the finished artist of magic.”

Well suited as occupational therapy for depressed, schizophrenic, and neurotic patients, magic could restore their self-esteem, distinguish them in a social group, and prevent them from feeling ignored, Kelley believed.
(For the same reasons, he found it inappropriate for those suffering from paranoia, delusions, and overinflated egos.) “
Magic gives the patient a feeling of superiority every time he fools an audience,” he told a newspaper reporter. “As a result, it will also promote a mild trend toward exhibitionism. This is a factor of great value in shy and reserved personalities.” As a therapy, magic was adaptable, cheap, and
safe even for suicidal patients. He spent hours teaching his ailing charges how to perfect the shell-and-pea illusion, make thimbles disappear, rejoin cords that had previously been cut, and perform other parlor tricks; stunts, he declared, that “require no brains and can’t go wrong.” Kelley took particular pride in the magic-aided treatment of a salesman debilitated by a fear of talking to others. “
After mastering three tricks to perform for other patients, the salesman recovered and returned to work,” a reporter wrote.

This therapy achieved another kind of magic: bringing Kelley to the attention of the press, which churned out numerous articles on his unexpected use of legerdemain. In San Francisco he evolved into a go-to spokesman on a range of issues in psychiatry.
He was quoted on topics as varied as the growing epidemic of mental illness and the lack of facilities and money available to treat psychiatric patients, the high number of military enlistees rejected for mental reasons, and the struggle to provide psychiatric services to the swarms of veterans who had needed them since World War I.

In addition, newspapers gave ample coverage to Kelley’s efforts in San Francisco to uncover ways to diagnose patients who refused to take the Rorschach test or accept other investigative attention. One involuntary diagnostic method that Kelley especially favored was the careful use of sodium amytal, a so-called truth serum, to batter down patients’ resistance. Kelley valued the drug, routinely used as an anesthetic and sedative, for its effect in smaller doses of leaving patients intoxicated and cooperative.
In such a state, often reinforced by a second injection of the sodium amytal, they would willingly answer questions and undergo the rigors of Rorschach examination.

Meanwhile Kelley had met and courted Alice Vivienne Hill, the wickedly smart daughter of a wealthy and conservative family in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Nicknamed Dukie (for “Little Dukie-Do,” an endearing acknowledgment of her cutely dignified blond presence),
she had emerged from the Girls’ Preparatory School in Chattanooga and Ward-Belmont College in Nashville, a prestigious finishing school, where she was president of the senior class and graduated with honors.

Dukie had relatives in Northern California and would often come to visit them. During one visit a cousin arranged for her to meet Kelley at an Eagle Scouts rally in San Francisco, where assistant scoutmaster Kelley had the spotlighted responsibility of lighting the conclave’s massive bon-fire. As they fell into conversation, Kelley’s booming voice—a barreling gale that could overpower a band’s playing, pierce through a crowd, and penetrate to the back of almost any room—made music with Dukie’s soft Tennessee counterpoint. Dukie felt a rush from dating the young psychiatrist. She found him handsomely beefy, funny, and bursting with ideas, and his teasing about her solemnity made her feel special. In a love note from the late 1930s, Kelley chided her: “
Life isn’t half so serious . . . and . . . we’ll probably arrive—so why worry too much over details along the way?” She was strong, a good match for Kelley’s formidable personality. Her family had—in a legendary account—helped establish Connecticut; his, California. They married in October 1940, with Dukie attending her wedding reception, as the Chattanooga papers described for society-page readers,
in a lynx-trimmed, Venetian blue wool ensemble, a matching turban, black gloves, and an orchid corsage.

Their time together as man and wife was brief. Within six months of America’s entry into World War II, less than eighteen months after their wedding, Kelley joined the US Army as a captain and was shipped off to Europe the following month. With his departure imminent,
Dukie gave him an ornately calligraphed and sarcastically faux military order, sealed with wax, that directed the new officer to stay connected with his bride. Kelley was commanded to send her letters containing “a panacea for worry
and loneliness,” to occupy himself as much as possible with thoughts of her, to dream pleasantly of her, and to remember her “eternal love + devotion + impatient waiting.” The document mandated that these orders applied until the end of the war and Kelley’s return to “the embrace of the reiteratively aforementioned and everlasting Mrs. Kelley.” It was a breezy, witty, affectionate note from a young wife who could have had little idea of the wartime experiences on which her husband was about to embark.

On the battlefields of World War I, soldiers had suffered horrendous psychological injuries that neurologists, psychiatrists, medics, nurses, and others had struggled to comprehend and treat. That war left mentally traumatized yet physically uninjured fighters—some of whom hadn’t come close to combat—paralyzed, blind, catatonic, dizzy, forgetful, terror stricken, hallucinatory, and awash in nightmares. Just among the Allies of World War I,
more than 1.6 million soldiers were laid low by wounds to the psyche. Psychoanalysts speculated that old conflicts in the unconscious, sometimes reaching back to childhood, accounted for this newly recognized war neurosis. Others suspected malingering. Caregivers subjected the affected troops to bed rest, solitary confinement, disciplinary punishment, electric shocks, and character-building talks in attempts to return them to health. Practitioners more familiar with recent advances in psychiatry used talk therapy, hypnotism, and reeducation. Were these patients insane, cowardly, weak willed, or something else?

World War II presented fighters with equally fearsome horrors. Far greater numbers of Americans experienced psychological trauma than in the previous war, and anyone who could relieve the troops’ tortures and, better still, send them back to duty, would be a hero to the military. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war, the US military was overwhelmed by
1.1 million disabling, psychiatric traumas.
Fear and stress were most often responsible. Kelley, serving as an army psychiatrist, called the problem “combat neurosis” and “combat exhaustion.”

Under the command of Lloyd J. Thompson, the army’s highest-ranking psychiatrist in the European theater, Kelley established the neuropsychiatric ward of the 30th General Hospital, one of the Allies’ first medical institutions devoted to combat exhaustion cases and to the training of doctors to manage battle stress successfully. With an abundance of psychologically distressed soldiers at his disposal, Kelley set aside ninety beds in his English hospital for the most treatment-resistant cases of battle neurosis.
He trained other doctors in battle psychiatry by staging shows that portrayed techniques of treatment using physicians and actual patients as actors. (Kelley could not resist introducing the hospital staff and patients to Oscar the Duck, a mechanical bird he used to pick cards in some of his favorite magic tricks.
He put Oscar to work in the rehabilitation of patients, as he had previously done in San Francisco.) The hospital later relocated to a former school building in Ciney, Belgium, closer to the fighting.

There Kelley and his colleagues had to determine whether they could heal traumatized soldiers for return to combat or to noncombatant duty, or if patients had to go back to the United States for further treatment. (A substantial number, he found, should never have been admitted into the military because they were psychopaths, mentally defective, or psychotic.) Being close to the front allowed Kelley to treat mentally wounded soldiers—who he insisted were not insane—as soon as possible, with the chance of healing them within three weeks.
After resting them with a hot shower, a good hot meal, and a deep, long sleep provoked by a high dose of insulin, he put them on a treatment regimen that initially included lengthy individual psychotherapy. That proved impractical when the patients piled up, however, and he turned to a new course of treatment starting in January 1944. Frequently following a round of narco-hypnosis—the use of such drugs as sodium pentathol or sodium amytal to induce a mental intoxication in which the patients relaxed their inhibitions and their recollection of the painful events of their traumas—Kelley placed soldiers in condensed sessions of group psychotherapy that he designed to allow them conscious insight into their problems. In meetings lasting four to five hours, groups
of ten to twenty combat-exhausted soldiers heard lectures from Kelley and others on the hospital staff familiar with the clinical application of general semantics. They gave the patients medical explanations for their symptoms and prepared the soldiers for symptoms of combat neurosis that they might develop. The group sessions always closed with discussions of the patients’ questions and their personal responses to the shocks of war. This was one of the first uses anywhere of group psychotherapy, and Kelley attributed its success to his Korzybskian method of giving “the patient some understandable, acceptable reasons for the development of his symptoms and [offering] him for the first time some techniques to overcome them. Basically, the techniques taken from Korzybski’s methodology represent a way to break up an acute conditioned reaction.” In an approach typical of the clinical application of general semantics, patients could replace their embarrassing neurotic symptoms with a rational, scientific explanation of their illness.

Kelley’s treatment of traumatized and shell-shocked servicemen filled a need for psychiatric treatment that had haunted the Allied armies. Seventy-five percent of casualties in 1943 at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa had been psychiatric cases without any visible wounds.
Throughout the North African campaign of the early years of the war, only 2 percent of the victims of combat exhaustion could regain their health enough to return to duty. Sixteen months later, during the D-Day invasion at Normandy,
more than 95 percent of the soldiers with combat neurosis returned to duty, and the training Kelley gave US military physicians undoubtedly contributed to that figure. Some of the improvement was due to nothing more than confidence. By giving soldiers traumatized by battle an explanation for their distress, Kelley helped them manage their emotions. It helped that Kelley radiated self-confidence in his methodology and won the trust of his patients through his boyish—and at times mischievous—exuberance.

His friends in the military appreciated his boisterous animation even if they didn’t always believe in Kelley’s methodology, unsure if he was a highly specialized medical man or a whiz kid with a fine array of tricks.
One army buddy, Howard Fabing, who worked with Kelley in the wartime hospitals, recognized that “
there was so much pure larceny in his heart. . . . He loved cons and grifters and wires and heels, and he was one of the few people who was always good for a laugh through the long months of periodic boredom which occurred in our war.” On one memorable day in August 1944 Kelley gutsily assisted a US Marine Corps flight surgeon in a scientific experiment.
Aboard a flight originating at Ridgewell, Essex, England, aloft between twenty-three thousand and twenty-six thousand feet, he agreed to remove his oxygen mask for forty-five minutes to study the effects. Although he exhibited the bluish skin symptomatic of a lack of oxygen, as well as euphoria, fatigue, and slurred speech, “Kelley’s tolerance to decreased barometric pressures is greater than any that I have observed,” the surgeon reported. The former Eagle Scout was remarkably tough.

Promoted to the rank of major in May 1944, Kelley took on steadily increasing responsibilities. During the remainder of the war he supervised all research for the development of new methods to treat combat exhaustion, took charge of the treatment of all psychiatric army cases in Europe, organized the army’s psychological clinics, and won appointment as European theater consultant in clinical psychology in March 1945. By then, as Germany’s surrender drew near, Kelley’s work was tailing off. “
I suspect in the not too far future he and others of the organization may find themselves deployed home,” a fellow officer wrote to Dukie in May 1945. It wasn’t to be.