NIH: U.S. National Library of Medicine
An Interview with Kerry Kelly Novick
Interdisciplinary and Intergenerational Connections: Personal and Professional Reflections on Gene Kelly's 1945 Film "Combat Fatigue Irritability"
February 12, 2013, U.S. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division
Interviewers: Jeffrey S. Reznick, Michael J. Sappol
JR: I'm Jeff Reznick. I'm chief of the History of Medicine Division here at the National
Library of Medicine.
MS: And I'm Mike Sappol. I am a historian in the History of Medicine Division at the
National Library of Medicine.
KKN: And I'm Kerry Kelly Novick. I'm a psychoanalyst, and I'm here both in that capacity and as
the daughter of Gene Kelly because we are talking about his wartime Navy training film,
"Combat Fatigue Irritability."
JR: Fantastic. Welcome to the Library. We're pleased to have you. It's a real honor and
privilege. Tell us more about yourself, where you're from and your upbringing and how you
became interested in the field in which you practice today.
KKN: Well, I was born in Los Angeles at the time my father was making his first film in
Hollywood. He had been in "Pal Joey" on Broadway in 1941 and was signed to a contract at MGM
and went to California to be in "For Me and My Gal" with Judy Garland and that's when
I was born. When I was growing up in California I was one of the few people I knew who had
been born in Los Angeles. That's what a small town it was then. And I was born in Los Angeles.
We were in the east living at my grandmother's in New Jersey during World War II, when my
father was stationed in Maryland where he was posted after boot camp in San Diego. And
then we went back to California after the war. And my parents bought their house on
Rodeo Drive, which became a kind of center for a whole group of transplanted New York
intellectual, artistic, creative folks who were part of...what became the Arthur Freed unit making
all the famous musicals through the next 10 years. And we lived in California on and off
from then on. When I was growing up as an only child in a house full of very active
lively grownups, because there were always lots of other grownups living in our house,
either transiently or permanently, other artists, dancers, musicians, writers; I was around
a lot listening to the grownups being part of what was going on. And one of the interesting
features of that time in the United States was that most intellectuals and most creative
people were in psychoanalysis. So the only person I knew growing up who was not in psychoanalysis
was my father, but everyone else was. And, of course, they talked about their therapy,
their analysis, their analysts. So I can't remember not knowing about psychoanalysis.
MS: Was your father opposed to psychoanalysis? Why was he the sole exception?
KKN: I think for several reasons. He was certainly not opposed, but he was a very self-sufficient
active person. And he was a little bit older than a lot of the other people in his circle.
And so I think he felt like he had it together and I think that he was busy with his creative
work and his various hobbies of sports and reading and history. So, he basically had
no need or no time.
MS: Could you say just a few words about your mother as well and how they came together
and produced you and sort of what it was like with the three of you as the corps?
KKN: It's a charming story. When my mother was 15 she graduated from high school and
Sarah Lawrence would not accept her until she was 16. And she was a dancer and decided
that she should get a job while she waited to go off to college at 16. So she answered
a casting call at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe in New York for a chorus call. My father was
the choreographer and the rest is history. She never went to college because they got
married when she was 17. And then she was in "The Beautiful People" on Broadway, was
kind of discovered by William Saroyan. And then this darling beautiful young talented
couple went off to Hollywood in a blaze of glory in the fan magazines.
MS: So you lived in a sort of charmed circle really around this charismatic mother and father
and these interesting intellectuals coming in and out and dancers and actors and writers.
And then the war happens. How did your father get to be in the U.S. military and how-- what
was his itinerary into the armed forces?
KKN: I'm not sure I knew a lot of detail about it because, of course, I was a baby at the
time. But the way it was always described in the family was that he had wanted to enlist
early on. He lost his very best life-long friend quite early in the war. A man called
Dick Dwenger and it had a big impact on him. It was a real blow and there were other friends
and relations in the services, but I think when Dick Dwenger died, my father wanted to
go to war right then. But he was under contract to the studio and he was doing a great deal
of USO and war bond tour work and also a lot of entertaining in hospitals. He was doing
a lot of hospital visiting and basically I think they held him back from joining up for
close to two and half years. So, finally at some point when he had finished making "Christmas
Holiday," I believe, he said okay, I'm going now and enlisted in the Navy and went to boot
camp in San Diego. And I don't know that people know this about him. He was an extraordinary
all around athlete and very strong and vigorous and you know pretty much a guy's guy. And
so one of the things he did at boot camp was he boxed. And, of course, the studio was horrified
that he was boxing. And I'm not sure the Navy loved it, because they quite liked having
publicity photographs of movie people in the services. But evidently he comported himself
quite respectably in the ring at boot camp. I believe he was a welterweight and so then
after boot camp he was, it was a big discussion about where he was going to be posted. And
they decided to put him in the Navy photographic unit to make training films. And he was I
think had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand it was a proper use of his talents
and capacities and he wasn't that young at that point. He was 32, so he wasn't at the
age of most young soldiers. So he was Lieutenant JG and put in that photographic unit. But
evidently after VE day he was being sent to a combat unit and then the bombs were dropped
in Japan and so he didn't go. But he was going to ship out sometime between VE day and VJ
day. So, in a sense he was going to get into combat eventually.
MS: It's interesting when you say that because there's a passage in the film, and we'll get
to the film in a second, of where he talks about his anger and not being able to shoot
at the enemy and fight the enemy and the frustration that he's in a place where he's below deck
and he can't see the enemy. And maybe he was channeling a little bit of his own frustration
and desire to contribute more actively and on the frontlines of the war effort. Do you think?
KKN: Well, I think that actors draw upon their own feelings and their own experience. So,
I don't know that I would say channeling his frustration. But certainly knowing what it
feels like to not be sure that you're completely pulling your weight or doing what is expected.
So, I'm sure that that informed that aspect of the performance.
JR: Yeah. So, we should-- let's focus on the film and then we can get to some questions
about your training. I understand that you trained with Anna Freud and perhaps a little
later you can talk about that experience and how your experience was overseas in London.
But why don't we turn our attention to the film. I think that would be a good idea.
MS: As you know the National Library of Medicine has the film "Combat Fatigue Irritability"
in its collection of 17,000 historical audiovisuals. And it's been sort of a lost film and Gene
Kelly's filmography not listed in most of the lists. Until very recently IMDB, which
is probably the most accessible filmography in the world, an internet filmography database,
didn't list the film until only a few months ago, probably in response to the National
Library of Medicine's posting of the film online. And so, apart from a few comments
in Alvin Yudkoff's biography on Gene Kelly and website not very many people knew about
the "Combat Fatigue Irritability" and Gene Kelly's role in making that naval training
film. When did you first know about it and was it discussed in your childhood or did
you-- when did you first see it? Let's start with your experience.
KKN: I did not see it until you all posted it online. I had heard of it and it was the
sort of thing that was just sort of known in the family. There wasn't discussion about
it. I don't recall first hearing about it. It was just that's what he did during the
war, was he made training films. And he used to talk about the research that he had done
for the film. He talked more about the experience of going to hospitals and psychiatric wards
in military hospitals then he did about actually making the film or the film itself. So I think
the context and content of the film was what was significant to him more than the making
of the film. Although I find it intriguing that this was his first directorial effort
and he certainly did a lot of later directing, both films that he was in and films that he
just directed. But I think he really enjoyed the experience of directing the film. He was
a very take-charge sort of person. So, being in that role would have been a pleasure to him.
MS: It's also from what I understand and I haven't seen it, he had done one film where
he played a kind of intense psychologically troubled character, a film called "Christmas
Vacation", which I had never seen.
KKN: "Christmas Holiday."
MS: "Christmas Holiday." Yeah. Have you seen that film?
MS: Years and years ago; I barely remember it. But, in fact, "For Me and My Gal", which
was a musical he also plays a rather bad character. And, of course, he had made his big name as
"Pal Joey", who was not a nice fellow at all. So, in fact, his first few important roles
were all guys with at the very least a chip on their shoulder or a nasty side or a shady
side. So, it's an interesting aspect to that sunny character who gets foremost in everyone's
minds from the later musicals.
MS: So this actually follows a kind of line of playing psychologically complex characters.
I had the story wrong. I really was thinking that your father was you know a sunny romantic
lead who's such a joyful dancer and you know the sort of a force of nature sunny optimist.
But he did have-- was already playing these complex characters.
KKN: Yes and there's a thread through his whole career of those. I mean the various
straight movies of varying quality, of course. There's "The Black Hand." There's "Cross of
Lorraine", which is an absolutely dreadful military sort of war potboiler. There was
an awful thriller called "The Devil Makes Three", which is a straight movie. There may
have been others and then there was "Inherit the Wind", which is I think a brilliant performance,
but not the nicest character either. So most of the straight roles were either crooks or nasty guys.
MS: Well, in this film "Combat Fatigue Irritability" he plays a character named Seaman Bob Lucas,
who's not really a nasty guy, but he's a--
KKN: Not at all.
MS: Pretty troubled man and I'm wondering if you want to say a little bit about in the
film "Combat Fatigue Irritability" Seaman Bob Lucas is suffering a great deal of psychological
torment over his experience in war. I wonder if you want to say something about the role
your father played and what he brought to it.
KKN: Well one of the things that really impresses me about the movie is how economically it
conveys a lot of information. In a sense we could write Seaman Bob Lucas' life story from
the very small bits that were given in the film that were extremely evocative. So we
get a character who was clearly a beloved sunny small-town big man on campus. Clearly
going with the cutest girl in town, part of a popular group of people in high school,
going on weenie roasts, going out to the old swimming hole, hay rides, the whole bit. And
then they all go off to war and have terrible experiences. And we see one of the old gang
back having lost an arm, others of the old gang... There's one seen where the guys are
getting together and we see their camaraderie, but we also see them all as emblematic of
guys who have been scarred by their experiences in combat. So, there's a whole biography very
economically conveyed in this very short film. And then we get to how this nice guy has been
troubled and transformed by his experiences in combat. And the bulk of the explicit performance
is him struggling with those symptoms and the feelings involved and the anguish that
he's going through, trying to process what happened to him and the guys around him.
MS: Yeah, so "Combat Fatigue Irritability" is one of a fairly large number of films.
In our collection we probably have 10 or 12 films made during this period that deal with
various aspects of the emotional difficulties and traumas of men going to war, either men
who have the difficulty of dealing with the initial experience with military discipline
and then the experience of undergoing terrible experience in battle some way and then we
have a number of films that'll also deal with physical trauma and men who have lost limbs
or have to adapt to life wearing prosthetic devices and undergoing various kinds of therapy
to prepare them for reentry into very changed civilian life and post-war world. And a lot
of the themes that you mention are there in all of these films. None of these films is
as good as "Combat Fatigue Irritability" and I attribute that to your father's active involvement
in the making of this film. It seems like he was really drawing, as you mentioned earlier,
on his own inner experiences, and also from what he was seeing going on around him. So,
one of the things that strikes me very particularly about this film in a way that is much more
interesting than a film called "Combat Exhaustion." We have a film called "Combat Insomnia."
KKN: Um huh.
MS: We have a film, and some of them actually also have Hollywood actors involved in them,
as again none of them taking as much of an active role in the making of the film as your
father did in "Combat Fatigue Irritability." But "Combat Fatigue Irritability" also has
a question about the challenge of being a man and I think that that's something that
seems like it's a powerful thematic during this period of time. How can you be a man
if you're afraid? How can you be a man if you're suffering torment? How can you be a
man if you have to accept military discipline? What do you see in the film as you know in
relation to your father? He was such a manly... figure in all of his films.
KKN: I think you're making a really interesting connection when you put together the question
of the impact of combat on people's functioning and the debilitating and humiliating nature
of some of the symptoms that are described in the film and in all the descriptions of
that situation, whether we call it shellshock or combat fatigue or combat exhaustion or
whatever. With the notion of how do you be a proper man and that that also has a sociocultural,
what was contemporary then to the question of what made somebody manly. And the convergence
of those sociocultural issues with the historical situation of the war and my father's own artistic
identity is quite an interesting notion in terms of why this film comes across in such
a vivid way. And let's go back then to the old comparison between Fred Astaire and Gene
Kelly because Fred Astaire was one kind of man and Gene Kelly was another kind of man.
And people are constantly comparing them and both guys were constantly asked about the
comparison. And we should establish that they were dear friends, adored each other, completely
respected each other, learned from each other, enjoyed each other's different styles, but
they had vastly different styles; both on the athleticism front and on what we might
call the class front. And so my father in numerous instances of interviews or conversations
used to talk about how Fred represented the classy guy, the upper-class guy, the white
tie and tails and that Fred's dancing was deft and dapper and very complex, lighter
touched. Whereas my father was the workingman's dancer. My father was a working-class guy.
My father danced in jeans and t-shirts and loafers; totally different wardrobe, totally
different bodies. So, my father's dancing was visceral, athletic. His center of gravity
was different from Fred Astaire's, the kinds of leaps or jumps were different. The repertoire
of steps and combinations was completely differently put together. So, all of those contrasts I
think in a funny way come into this film, "Combat Fatigue Irritability", because the
challenge to all the soldiers in the scenes of the group meetings with the psychiatrist
really have to do with these guys trying to establish some sort of you know revived dignity.
And a lot of the time they're doing it by comparing themselves with others, comparing
themselves with goldbricking guys sitting behind the desks or comparing themselves with
the civilians who don't get it, or comparing themselves with the other guys on the ship
or in the unit. There's a lot of comparison which we all know is stereotypically one of
the ways men strut their stuff is you know being better than the other guy, bigger than
the other guy, stronger than the other guy, faster than the other guy. We're doing this
interview in the middle of the Olympics, so there's a kind of comparison context. So,
I think in the film the way Seaman Lucas' character is written and acted where we see
him angry, we see him blustering, we see him being snide to other people, putting other
people down a lot. Then we see him break down and cry and that I think was part of the message
of the movie, which is that everybody feels a whole range of feelings and if Gene Kelly
can do it, anybody can; it's okay. So there was a huge emotional normalizing message in
the film, I think.
MS: Yeah, I mean some historians have called these kind of films that there's a kind of
crisis of masculinity in these films and in American culture generally in this period
of time, although probably there's never a period of time where there isn't some kind
of crisis of masculinity. But, there's another masculinity here in the film which is the
figure of the military psychiatrist. And he's someone who never breaks down and never loses
composure and is always in command, so there's a kind of tension between that character and
your father, and the role that your father plays in the film, Seaman Bob Lucas, who as
you point out is constantly challenging everyone around him saying they're not really manly.
They're not-- they're goldbrickers, they're flunkies, they're, they're-- they don't understand.
They can't understand. No one can understand he constantly says.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: So, I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about the figure of the military
psychiatrist. Do-- yeah, I'm sorry.
KKN: Well, I find him a very interesting figure because he comes across as much more of a
stereotype or a paste board figure, a mouthpiece for perhaps the official line. Official may
be both medical and military line. And there is a real tension within the film embodied
in Seaman Lucas and Dr. Bush, the psychiatrist. But I think that also reflects a tension that
has been going on since World War I, if not before, maybe even from the Civil War, around
how do we deal with whatever we want to call this phenomenon that has to do with the impact
of combat service on a group, a percentage, a proportion of soldiers or sailors or marines
or airmen. So, the figure of that psychiatrist, it's a thankless role I would imagine for
poor Lauren Gilbert, playing it. Because there's not much to get his teeth into. He's got to
be a sort of patrician patronizing authority figure. He's got to have all the answers.
So he's not allowed to evince any conflict or any complexity whereas everybody else in
the movie gets to be like a real person who has conflict and complexity. So, I think it's
a slightly unequal battle if it's a battle and poor Dr. Bush doesn't come off all that
well. Although he tries really hard to be sincere, especially at the end of the movie
when there's a very nice, full-face close up of him earnestly conveying the message
of the movie, which is a good message. Which is about when you face your feelings and come
to grips with them, everything will get better.
MS: Well, in some sense though he's the hero of the movie. I mean there's this kind of--
these two heroes in this film and in the end he has the last word and he's the one who
says not only do you have to face your fears, but you also should go to someone who's a
training professional psychiatrist who has command of all this and can orchestrate the
process. And World War II, of course, is a period when the U.S. military more than any
war before starts recruiting trained psychiatrists into the officer corps and starts getting
reports of how we can do kind of emotional psychological management of men at war and
to some degree women at war as well.
KKN: Well, they weren't doing any management of the women at war in World War II. It was
even after Vietnam women in the service and in the ancillary services like nurses were
completely unserved in terms of their emotional needs. And it really is only in the last 15
years or so that the needs of women in the services have been considered psychologically
at all. So let's, let's put that on the record.
MS: I think you're right although in the film that we see it's a military hospital for men.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: There are no female patients. We actually do have films that are training films for
women that do some kind of attempt through the medium of film and that's another aspect
of our story here, to do psychological management through the medium of film and address the
psychological needs of women at war.
KKN: Uh huh.
MS: Of course, they don't address the problem of trauma. What they do, they sort of here's
the problems of how to be feminine as a person who's doing military service.
KKN: Yeah.
MS: That is, that is the problem that those films address.
KKN: Yeah, which is a completely different level of concern.
MS: Absolutely.
KKN: We could consider it a more superficial level of concern, although the issue of identity
in the military gets us back to how do you be a man and have XY and Z happen to you.
So, that's maybe a tangential direction, but if we go back to the character of the psychiatrist,
maybe I'm biased, but I see Bob Lucas as the hero of the movie, since it's my father playing
the part. But I don't see the psychiatrist as the other hero or the only other hero.
I think actually the psychiatrist and the corpsman orderly guy represent a persisting
tension in the psychiatric treatment of everybody, not just military personnel and I find that
really quite interesting that that duality shows up even in this movie. If we go back
a little bit to what you were saying about the recruitment of trained psychiatrists,
people who understood mental troubles into care of military personnel, yeah, it was certainly
vastly increased. I think it started with the British army and then the Americans began
adopting it seeing that it made sense to the Brits. But around World War I, specialists
were also called in, usually in the aftermath of the war so people like Freud and his circle,
the neurologists and psychiatrists of that day, were very much involved in the treatment
of soldiers after World War I. But in the film we see the psychiatrist talking about
facing your feelings, uncovering, discovering, abreacting if you will, and we see the orderly
with a much more pragmatic realistically-based approach about engaging, doing, being active.
And then the psychiatrist does prescribe the occupational therapy, the woodshop, the basket
weaving and the swimming and all of that. But I think there's a very interesting thread
to discuss of the tension between the uncovering of the less conscious and the pragmatic more
cognitive active response to troubles. Which in a sense, because this film was made in
'44-'45, we're looking at where army or military psychiatry had arrived toward the
end of the war. But if we look back at where it was at the beginning of the war they didn't
know what they were doing. They had no idea how to deal with the psychological casualties.
There's a manual that I haven't actually seen, but I've seen excerpts from that was a psychiatric
manual about internal-- manual for psychiatrists I think in the North Africa theater and maybe
people at the VA actually have access to this. Maybe you guys have it here at the Library
of Medicine. And from what I've read in excerpts from that manual the doctors were bemoaning
how they felt like they didn't have a clue. They didn't know what to do and they were
rushing around trying to figure out how can we treat these guys who are in dire need of
treatment. And they went back then to old materials from the first world war seeking
methodology, seeking treatment methods and they came up with the medication aspect. The
sort of opioid medication and sedation medication that we see in "Combat Fatigue Irritability"
and they came up with the cathartic abreactive uncovering the unconscious feelings methodology.
But both those strands were from World War I and that's what they were doing throughout
the war. So when we get to toward the end of the war where that had become standard
practice, best practice, by the end of the war as we see in this film, because I think
this film depicts what was considered state of the art, because it's an official mouthpiece
of, statement of it. By that time it began to sound more psychoanalytic. But, in fact,
it wouldn't have been considered psychoanalytic by the practitioners. It was only after the
war when all those army psychiatrists went back into civilian hospitals and university
departments. They then saw psychoanalytic training in university academic medical school
departments became very psychoanalytic. That was post war. So that was a slight difference
between my view of the history of that and how you describe it in your article about
the film Mike.
MS: Yeah, just to clarify, I, I think that this is a subject that certainly deserves
very close detailed historical research on and I've read a little bit about what exists
on that now. What I tried to describe that, and maybe you can speak to it, that this is
a film that does show the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and ideas of young, of unconscious
conflict and how in order to resolve--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Contradictions and acting out of various things that you have to bring these to the
surface and there has to be some kind of catharsis breakthrough.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: But you're an expert; I'm not. I'm not a psychoanalyst so I'm just wondering do you
see that there in the film? Is that-- that was something that I think you're right.
KKN: Yeah.
MS: An act of discovery in part, but it was also a period when Freudian psychoanalysis
was growing in cultural prestige and presence in the arts and lots of--
KKN: Yes indeed.
MS: And places in American life.
KKN: It was and it's one of the interesting things about what is still relevant from the
film and what is sort of dated because at that point both in Freudian psychoanalysis,
but also in popular culture the notion of catharsis, the get it out, the ah-hah moment
and what nowadays I would call movie psychiatry. You know suddenly there's a shattering insight
and everything is now fine. That was the prevailing wisdom at that point, but psychoanalysis and
psychology and psychiatry have come a great distance from that idea now because even Freud
before the Second World War was writing, for instance, in his piece called "Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through" about the fact that first you have to remember. First you
have to uncover or let whatever it is surface. But then you have do something with it. Then
you have to work it through. And this is where I find it so intriguing that in "Combat Fatigue
Irritability" again very economically, very sparsely we get both those ideas. We get the
psychiatrist talking about the uncovering and the cathartic experience which then produces
an insight into the meaning. But then we get the corpsmen saying yeah, and you also have
to do something about it. Which funnily for me relates very much to my father's psychology
as a person. And part of what has been interesting for me about the process of actually seeing
this movie and rediscovering this whole thing is thinking about, as we all do, about the
influences on our own personalities and functioning and our own vocational choices of our parents.
And I am more and more aware that my father's pragmatic bent, my father's active stance
in the world, has been very influential for me not only as a person of some energy and
activity in my life, but also in terms of my ideas as a professional that my brand of
psychoanalysis, because in fact every psychoanalyst has their own brand. We draw from a lot of
ideas, but since we are the instrument of the work we end up creating our own brand.
My own brand is like a combination of the psychiatrist in the movie and the corpsman
in the movie because the work that I do with people of all ages really has to do with let's
understand it, but once we've understood it what are we going to use that insight for?
How are we going to put that insight into action so that you can change your life.
MS: That's very nicely put. I have a few other questions. One is..., maybe it's more of a
personal question. Many of us have... we see our parents in photographs when they're young.
People of my generation maybe we have a few minutes of silent home movies or something
to show when, what our parents looked like when were little. And then something you can
revisit when you're later in life, I guess later generations now have probably hours
and hours of home video.
KKN: Far too much.
MS: I can't speak to that, but what is it like for you to see your father at an age
when you were a small child, vibrant, young active and where does that take you? Of course,
this is just one of many films which you have to see it, but it's actually a very particular role.
KKN: I just think I'm very lucky because I have both my parents throughout their whole
lives, always accessible. And it is strange in a way. I mean often I'll get in the car
to go out to the store and turn on the motor and the radio will come on and there's my
father's voice singing. Or once I was in the car and I think it must have been on fresh
air or something. It was an interview with Ernest Borgnine who played Marty in one of
my mother's most famous films and my mother's voice came on the radio and sounded exactly
like my voice. And I realized oh, I was, at the time I was hearing this interview, the
same age that she was when she was in "Marty." So there is this wonderful layering that I
get to have of having my parents at all ages with me at all ages. And it's a funny public
private kind of existence. My siblings and I had always worried what it would be like
when my father died. Would we feel somehow intruded upon or invaded by it being a public
event. And, in fact, we felt extraordinarily comforted by the outpouring of feeling, by
how much he meant to other people. So, it's, it's not at all bad. There isn't a down side
to having you know the access to it. I do think it's an interesting thing psychologically
since I am a child psychoanalyst as well as an adult psychoanalyst and very involved in
understanding matters of child development that people on the screen are like 27 times
natural size. So, I do sometimes wonder what it was like for me as a four or five, six
year old, seeing my father on the screen enormous. But peoples' fathers loom pretty large in
their lives anyway. So, maybe I could make the distinction.
MS: Yes they do. I'm wondering about, you mentioned Lauren Gilbert. Jocelyn Brando plays
Seaman Bob Lucas' romantic, his small town girlfriend, fiancée. Are those familiar people
to you? Are they family friends? Did you know those people and see them?
KKN: No. No I never heard of Lauren Gilbert until I saw the listing from your posting
online. Jocelyn Brando I don't recall being around when I was a child. Marlon was a family
friend and was around a lot throughout you know our whole lives. But I don't recall our
knowing Jocelyn in California at all. Perhaps my parents did but it was clear to me from
looking at the surround of it and thinking of when she was in New York and when my parents
were in New York at the beginning of the war, before they went to California. They must
have been New York friends. They were theater friends because Jocelyn Brando was in theater
productions in New York at the same time as both my parents... in the early 40s.
JR: Let's turn, Kerry, to your background as a psychotherapist. And talk to us if you
would about your training with Anna Freud. What was that like and how did you come to
work with her in the way that you did?
KKN: Well I was going to go visit my mother who lived in London right after college. So,
I went off to London when I was 21 to see my mom. And at that point I was still uncertain
about what I wanted to do with my life. I'd always had being a psychoanalyst on my list,
but in those days which was the early 60s, the only way to become a psychoanalyst in
this country was if you were a medical doctor. And I had an undergraduate degree in comparative
literature. So, there was no way that I was going to get a psychoanalytic training in
this country. But, of course, the tradition was completely different in Europe. In Europe,
from the very beginning of psychoanalysis, women were trained just as much as men, and
non-medical people were trained just as much as medical people. And so I was kind of casting
about in my mind about how I was going to go about getting training if that indeed was
what I wanted to do. And so at some point in the course of the first few months there,
I decided yes, indeed, I did want to be a psychoanalyst. I considered going to medical
school, but as they said to me in England I was a woman. I was a foreigner and I had
an arts background. So medical school was not going to happen so I started exploring
other avenues and I'd always wanted to work with children. So I investigated the three
places in London at the time that one could train as a child analyst. It was kind of a
naieve subject in a sense because I hadn't studied it as an undergraduate except in the
psychology course. So, I read Anna Freud's book and Melanie Klein's book and Margaret
Lowenfeld's book and I visited the three training places and decided that the best fit for me
was Anna Freud's approach, her training place, her book and presented myself. And they looked
at me like I was crazy because here was this 21 year old American comp-lit person and they
said well, you're too young and you don't have a psychology degree and you've never
worked in the field. So, I went off and got a psychology degree the next year and came
back and said, "I have the degree." And they said, but you've never worked and you're still
pretty young, because now you're 22. And so I went off and got a job with the Medical
Research Council and volunteered in a psychiatric hospital and then came back to them and represented
myself and said, "Okay guys, take it or leave it" you know. I've done what you wanted. So
the said yes, okay you will be our experiment in youth. We'll admit you to psychoanalytic
training. So, I'm kind of an odd bird in the field because I don't have a prior professional
identity. I am only a psychoanalyst and most people in my field have an alternative professional
identity that they had first as a psychiatrist or a social worker or a psychologist. And
so I trained as a child analyst and at that point Anna Freud was in her 70s and at the
peak of her productivity and her eminence and her pre-eminence in the field. She was
the most important psychoanalyst in the world and pretty much you know there was some survey
done at that time of psychiatrists and psychologists. And she was the top ranked person in the field.
So it was an extraordinary experience to train there. I was there for four years as a trainee
and then on staff at the Hampstead Clinic until we left England in '77. She was the
most brilliant person I've ever met; funny, shy, slyly witty once she felt comfortable.
Completely fluent at formulating, could take detail and put it together in a way that I've
seen no one do ever since. When she would give a talk, a scientific presentation or
a talk at a university you know or get an honorary degree or whatever she'd have a yellow
pad with four sentences written on it and deliver a publication ready talk. She was
formidable and amazing. Also very clear in her ideas, a combination of decisive in her
thinking but extremely open-minded. If you were intelligent and you could back up what
you said, she'd listen to anything. So, being a rather feisty American young person. I've
never been one to not speak my mind. I was brought up in a liberal household where the
idea of saying what you think, and your right to speak up, was very fostered. It was a very
interesting experience to be in the presence of somebody like Anna Freud. The other thing
that was very interesting about the Hampstead Clinic was that it was a non-profit institution
and therefore had independent funding so it could offer clinical services and various
kinds of community services at little or no cost. So, the 80 or 90 children or adolescents
who were in treatment there at any given time at that point donated what they could to subsidize
their treatments and those of us who were studying there did not pay any tuition. We
were also not paid any stipend but there were various foundation grants that many of the
students were able to have. But the clinic ran a well-baby clinic, a blind baby's nursery,
a nursery school for the community, all kinds of research departments. So, there was a tradition
that came from Vienna of free clinics run by psychoanalysts in the community and work
with disadvantaged groups like the group of concentration camp children that Anna Freud
and her colleagues took care of through and after the war. So, all of us who trained there
also identified with that tradition of what we called altruistic analysis. And so anybody
who trained with Anna Freud, all the people who came to this country as child analysts
either as emigres at the end of the war or subsequently because they trained with Anna
Freud in London. We've all been active in community efforts so it's a very, it was a
very strong and powerful identificatory influence on all of us and a very identity forming experience
to train with her.
JR: And certainly many, many aspects of that experience have informed your establishment
of the Allen Creek Preschool where you are.
KKN: That's correct.
JR: Could you say more about that school and how you came to establish that and what it's
all about.
KKN: I will try to do it slowly and shortly because if we're talking about those efforts
I can go on and on. There were several of us who had been doing consultation to preschools
and daycares throughout southeast Michigan for many years. And we had a little study
group of those of us who were doing those consultations and those were free services
again. And at some point we realized that there was a certain amount of frustration
in just being a consultant in a school, because we were subject always to the vagaries of--
who the director of the school was or what the board of the school decided they wanted
to do. And so somebody said the fateful words, well if we had our own school we would be
in charge of the school culture and the way it was organized. So, a bunch of us psychoanalysts,
other physicians, community people, business people, twelve us in fact, started to get
together regularly to talk about well what would it mean to start a school and kind of
thrash out what our ideas were. And we met for a year, year and a half every month. Sunday
morning somebody would have brunch and we'd have these discussions. And finally we said,
okay, let's do it. So we each put in 50 bucks and incorporated. So, we're talking true grassroots
non-profit. I knew nothing about running a non-profit. I knew nothing about running a
small business, which is what a school is. I knew nothing about fundraising, but I wanted
to start a school and the idea was a school that would support the development of children
by supporting the parent-child relationship. Because as psychoanalysts we are all very
aware of the interconnectedness of development within the family and we thought that one
of the things we saw in our travels in the preschool world was the lack of understanding
of the importance of the parent's role. And a lack of understanding of parenthood as a
phase of development in itself, needing support just as little children's development needs support.
MS: Could you just briefly set a chronology just because we've kind of covered a few different--
KKN: Right, yes well.
MS: And just so that people have an idea of when you studied with Anna Freud. And when--
KKN: Certainly.
MS: Allen Creek School started.
KKN: Okay, I trained at the Hampstead Clinic from 1966 to 1971 or 70 and then I was on
the staff there until 1977. And in 1977 my husband and I moved back to the states. He
came back to be chief psychologist of the youth services at the University of Michigan
Department of Psychiatry in Ann Arbor and I had small children. So I only worked part-time
at that point. I became a lecturer in psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Department of
Psychiatry. And then we both had private practices and then we had our third child in Michigan.
In the interim there was a 10-year period when a group of us ran a low-fee treatment
clinic in Ann Arbor and then when that wound up because there were enough other low-fee
treatment facilities opening up in the community, that was in the 80s, then I guess or altruistic
analysis was at a loose end. And we were doing this preschool consulting in the community
so we incorporated Allen Creek as a non-profit in 94. And then we started the first parent
toddler groups in 95 in a church hall and then realized that we needed our own building.
So the evolution of it was that we, long before social entrepreneurship, became a buzz word
concept we created a non-profit/for-profit partnership by creating a for-profit real
estate limited liability company in order to raise money to build a building, which
would offer the premises at no rent for a period of time to the non-profit so the school
could get on its feet. So we you know raised the money, built the building in the summer
of '96 and in fall of '96 opened the doors to our new building. And we, the group of
us who had organized the real-estate partnership gave Allen Creek two years to be able to pay
rent and within 18 months Allen Creek was paying rent. So, I was very proud of both
arms of this. It was a whole group effort. Everybody worked very hard on it. I was probably
the engine of the effort and I was the one who you know was at the construction site
at seven o'clock every morning with the punch list and over there every night at sundown
to make sure that things stayed on time and came in under budget. And when the school
started I was the person who was there every day and I was the first parent-toddler teacher
and the first parent-infant teacher. So, it was a labor of love. It was a second full-time
unpaid job. But it has become a community institution. It's now 2014. It's been in the
black for two years and not many non-profits have that longevity or that bottom line. And
we've accomplished the most important hurdle for a non-profit, which is that we've turned
it over to the leadership of others. So the-- you know so many non-profits don't outlive
the charismatic founders and so ensuring the succession was something that was very important
to us and that has now happened. So my husband and I are like grandparents now. We get to
come to staff meetings when we're in town and we have no day-to-day responsibility, which is exactly how it should be. I'm very proud of it.
MS: We've gone quite a long time. What time is it now? A little after 11:00. I don't want to wear you out. I have a couple more questions.
KKN: I work 14 hour days. Nothing wears me out.
I do. When I see patients I work from 7:50 in the morning until 9 at night. So I'm OK.
I spend my whole day having dialogs with people. MS: I guess so you're very good at this. Much better than I am. I spend my whole day at a desk not talking to anyone.
KKN: But you get to watch all these cool movies. MS: I do.
MS: I was thinking about you know these two other films that your father worked at during
the war with-- one was, "Mission Completed," which he just is the narrator for. And--
KKN: Is that the one with George Raft?
MS: Yeah, it's with George Raft and then there's one called, "Battle Stations," which I haven't
seen. And-- but clearly, "Combat Fatigue Irritability" is the film-- Your father... It's his film.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: It really is. It's almost as if he is the auteur. And--
KKN: Even though we don't know who wrote the script, which I think is so frustrating. I
wish we knew.
MS: That is a research project that I hope someone will undertake, because we don't know
right now. But, there may be records in the National Archives--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: That can reveal some of the production process. They may even have a script there.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Who knows? And I guess your father-- did he have his own film collection? Did he--
KKN: He did have his own film collection. He also had his own script collection. But,
his house burned to the ground in the early 80s and so much of that was lost. I don't
think he had any of these Navy films--
MS: No. I think these would have been--
KKN: They wouldn't have been his property. They were restricted and well none of his
films were his property, because in the days of contract players they had no rights to
the films at all and no royalties and residuals, no percentages back in the day. And when Ronald
Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild he sold those rights down the river
for actors. So, as a union president his membership was not well served by his union presidency.
MS: Well, and then another question which is, it's really peripheral, but I'm interested
in it, is the politics of the time. And I can say this-- my own background is that both
of my parents were communists. They lived in New York, because my father was no celebrity.
He worked in-- he was-- of course, he was a soldier and he was in the Army for six years
during World War II, but after that he worked in factories and stores. And so I'm interested
in sort of what sort of political atmosphere in which, "Combat Fatigue Irritability" came
about in that period of time and your parents views of their circle.
KKN: Well, I think there is a lot of public record about that. But, my father was always
what one would call a Jeffersonian Democrat, very liberal, very open minded, very invested
and steeped in American history. And very clear in his own ideas about what was right,
you know ready to die for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights particularly, very
upstanding and loyal to his friends most of whom were much further left than he including
my mother. Certainly during the war everybody was on the Soviet American Friendship Committee,
because they were our allies. And my mother was never a member of the Communist Party,
certainly went to a few meetings and we certainly had many friends in my parent's circle who
were members of the party and certainly many what were later called fellow travelers. But,
I did grow up in an intensely involved political household. And so I can't remember ever not
hearing about what was going on politically at every level, from local politics to state
politics to national politics to international politics. So, it was in a sense a very sophisticated
political upbringing and it continued to be in the atmosphere all my life. But, certainly
during the war and right after the war, things were very lively, and again I can't remember
dinner table conversations that weren't all about all that stuff all the time. And because
I was an only child in a household of adults who was included in everything, I was listening
all the time to everybody debating and talking and thinking about strategies. And, I can
remember the 1948 presidential campaign. That's the first one I have any real memories of,
and then I remember working in the next few elections, working very hard for Stevenson
and so all of that was pretty par for the course around our house. My mother was blacklisted
and that coincided pretty much with the time that my family moved to Europe for 18 months
in 1952, '53. And that was-- there was a tax thing where if artists went abroad for
18 months they could save on their income taxes. So, that was the structure of our sojourn
abroad, but it did also coincide with my mother's being blacklisted. And then she was kind of
reinstated when Hecht Lancaster made "Marty" and they employed blacklisted writers, directors
and actors under their own names. But, certainly the whole circle of friends growing up right
after the war and into the '50s,...many of our friends went to jail, many of our friends
were in the Hollywood Ten. My father went with a group of people from Hollywood to Washington
to support the Hollywood Ten at the hearings. The first television we had in our house was
bought for the Army-McCarthy hearings and I was kept home from school to watch that
on television. So, the political climate was pretty distinct.
MS: Sounds very rich and intense. That's great. Do you have any other further questions? Oh,
I have one more.
KKN: Go.
MS: You spoke last night about PTSD and current thinking, ideas, practices, related to the
traumatic experiences that people in the armed services-- of course, we could generalize
that also to traumatic people, traumatic experiences that people have in all sorts of encounters
in life.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Rape victims, victims of crime and other things. Could-- do you want to speak a little
bit about the film and the treatment of trauma then and what's happening now?
KKN: Yes. I found it fascinating that in the film we see those two treatment methods as
well as the corpsman's practical methods. But, the two treatment methods that the psychiatrist
is talking about are the abreactive talking therapy, if you will, and medication. And
I thought it was very interesting that there is still this same duality in our treatment
approaches and a continuing ambiguity and tension and confusion, if you will, about
how to gauge the relative effectiveness of those different approaches and how to combine
them for the maximum effectiveness. And we're in a period of time of ferment in psychology
and psychiatry at the moment where we had a biological psychopharmacologic revolution
starting in the early '80s and that really swept the board. And now we're kind of getting
the pendulum swinging back a little bit for two reasons, one because the psychopharmacologies
did not fulfill their early promise. They turn out not to help as much as people wished
they would. And two, because the data that they were supposedly based on is increasingly
found to be suspect at best and fraudulent at worst. So, I think we're really struggling
with "oh wait a minute," we have to go back to more humanistic, more whole person,
more psychological methods, if you will, and reexamine all the talk therapies and really
look at what can we glean from the various traditions and the new methodologies in that
realm. So, I think the direction of research and clinical research now is a promising one
from my point of view. Because I think we're beginning to look again at stuff that I'm
pretty convinced is relevant, which has to do with relating to people as people and not
as conglomerates of chemicals. Because I think we just don't know enough to think that we
can fine-tune things neurologically, chemically yet. Maybe we will someday, but in the meantime,
I want to communicate with people's minds.
JR: One of the great things about your presentation yesterday evening, among the many great things
about it, was the way in which you imported your professional experience with the personal,
with the historical. And we have in this film, as we've discussed here and as you discussed
yesterday, but I'm asking if you could say more about this, we have a unique, truly unique
opportunity to use and talk about a historical production as a touchstone for again your
professional experience, background, personal experience and the legacy of your father.
And could you say a little bit more about the use of history in being a resource for
us to understand and appreciate where we've come from and how we grapple with issues today
in this context of care, of service members with post-traumatic stress? I think we've
got other films as Mike Sappol has said.
KKN: Um huh.
JR: Where do you think we might go with this in terms of a next step? Might you hope more
people see this film? I hope--
KKN: Um huh.
JR: To learn about it, about the work of your father as another dimension to his work that
may be unfamiliar. What would you like to see in terms of the future of this unique
opportunity perhaps?
KKN: Well, I think Harold Bloom said only barbarians are not interested in history and
talked about the importance of knowing our history. And there are many ways in which
as a psychoanalyst I am deeply invested in history, and as a developmentalist I'm deeply
invested in history, personal history, because I deal with individuals and individuals within
families. But, individuals and their families are part of a community. So, we are by definition
embedded in our cultural and social history as well. What's fascinating about this film
is the way it crystallizes so many of those dimensions in a kind of, it's interesting
that I think of it as a Russian doll, that it encapsulates all those layers in extraordinarily
condensed economical form. So, I think that this particular film could be very useful
in a number of ways. It's a lovely slice of what people looked like and seemed to like
then. The home front scenes when Seaman Lucas goes home on leave are charming. The wardrobe,
the costumes, the setting of the household, the way the staircase and the doorways are
made, the whole thing is wonderful as a bit of cultural history. In terms of the medical
history: the treatment methodology. I don't if people noticed there's a detail that fascinated
me. On the blackboard behind the doctor, psychiatrist, there's written up in chalk a list of symptoms
and those are the same symptoms that are the constellation that we talk about now. On the
blackboard it said "insomnia, vomiting, tremor" and that's what we deal with now.
That's what state-of-the-art current PTSD literature talks about. At a professional
conference in New York just this past January 2014, at a discussion of PTSD in veterans,
the predominance of insomnia as the first symptom to address, because without addressing
sleep disturbances almost nothing else can be dealt with. These things are right there
in this movie. So, I see this film as a very useful, also because it's short, a very useful
discussion starter. A discussion starter about how does society think about soldiers. How
do we think about mental illness? How do we think about masculinity? How do we think about
adult development and the changes that experiences brings in our identities? How do we think
about relationships and their evolution, because there is an emblematic picture of a relationship
that was frozen in time. They were engaged right out of high school and then he went
away to the war and he comes back two years later. Are they the same people? Can they
pick up where they left off? No. Their relationship has to evolve, etc. So, I think there are
all kinds of groups that could use this film to start very interesting discussions and
those could be medical groups, sociocultural historians, film historians, all kinds of
people could find this film fascinating. And I am now terribly intrigued at the rest of
your collection of films. So, the other thing that seems very important is to publicize
what you guys have here, because as I said to you yesterday, I'm kind of an informed
consumer and certainly an informed citizen and I didn't know about the National Library
of Medicine. I didn't know it existed. Everybody needs to know about this. This is our National
Library of Medicine. We own this. So, I want us all to have access to what you have. I
think different professional groups need to know, not just doctors even though it's the
National Library of Medicine, but all kinds of professional groups need to know what you
have here. So, you know roll on history into the present and the future, because history
is about how we got here. It created the present and we are now creating the future. So, let's
make some history more accessible.
MS: You're preaching to the choir here. Well said.
KKN: But, I'm preaching to your blog too.
MS: Thank you. Thank you for that... great endorsement. I-- you reminded me that-- of
course, I wanted to show you this. We have this very short cartoon, a few quick facts
about fear. But, as some of-- we have a number of films in which the talking point's on the
blackboard and actually sometimes a blackboard or some other diagram is shown in this period
you know going... through various points that are made in this film. I mean there are the--
obviously your father in making this film was deeply involved with military psychiatrists
and people sort of working on this script to have--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: This is the most eloquent film.
KKN: The George Raft one was shot at Swarthmore.
MS: Um huh.
KKN: That's-- I've seen stills from that one, but never seen it. But, that was actually
shot at Swarthmore. I don't know if this one was shot at Swarthmore or not.
MS: I suspect that it was.
KKN: Yeah.
MS: But, I don't know. Of course, we do have this film, "Combat Insomnia," which stars
the Hollywood actor Dick York who played--
KKN: Dick York the--
MS: Samantha's husband.
KKN: The blonde guy?
MS: He played on the TV show, "Bewitched." He played the witch's husband.
KKN: Um huh. This was the same Richard York, Dick York, yeah.
MS: And he's very young.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Very, very young in the film. Then of course, that film is really not very good
compared to--
KKN: Uh huh.
MS: "Combat Fatigue Irritability." "Combat Fatigue Irritability" is not-- you know obviously
it's got a few kind of rough-- it's not a Hollywood production, but it's about as close
as military filmmaking gets to that--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: In this period.
KKN: That probably has a lot to do with my father's perfectionist attitude to work. You
know you get it right. You do it completely. You do it fully. You keep doing it until you
get it right, etc. So, he probably pushed as far as he possibly could.
MS: I'm sure he did and I'm sure he -- the actual words spoken, the actual script you
know has-- it's much more-- it's a much higher standard. It's much more dramatic and theatrical
than-- the scripts for these other films are very wooden and stilted and--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: There's no point at which you really quite can believe that these might be people on
the planet Earth--
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Or you know it doesn't come close.
KKN: That's so interesting, because not having seen the other ones, I don't really have a
basis for comparison.
MS: Well, I'll have to show you--
KKN: I would love to see them.
MS: Or send you the links to some. Of course, we have-- there's one film we have. It's called,
"The Inner Story." And it has some aspects of the same thematics that, "Combat Fatigue
Irritability" has. It's a film about what happens in your mind when--
KKN: How fascinating.
MS: When-- what happens in your mind. In that film your mind-- the film switches from live
action to animation.
KKN: How strange.
MS: And so it's a film that tries to explain psychosomatic symptoms.
KKN: Um huh, interesting.
MS: And--
KKN: That's pretty relevant now.
MS: The soldier who's experiencing the psychosomatic symptoms is someone who before he enters the
military he is kind of the big man on campus and then is someone who is drafted and then
he's not treated very well. And he's having trouble fitting in and his fellow soldiers
don't really think he's such a big shot.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: And-- he's-- it's an infantilizing process and of course, "Combat Fatigue Irritability"
has some aspects of that as well where-- especially in the opening scenes where your father is
shown in the hospital.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: And the people are kind of sitting around in their beds playing cards or looking at
girlie magazines and seem involved. Lucas is shown not really enjoying that or fitting
in or liking that too much.
KKN: No. In a sense the way it's-- that scene is set up he's irritated with the other soldier
whom I perceived as dumb or sedated or both, probably both. And so it's part of what makes
Seaman Lucas' character interesting is-- sure he's irritable and much too impatient. He's
not nice to the guy, but he's also smart. And so he's tired of waiting for the other
guy to play his card.
MS: He does play a character who has given more psychological complexity than anybody
else and he's not really-- you're right. I mean I think he's-- he judges them.
KKN: Um huh.
MS: Anyway.
JR: Well, this has been a real pleasure and we're very, very grateful for your time and
your expertise and your experience. And thank you for spending this morning with us.
KKN: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for all the work you do.