The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (28 page)

While professing faith in America’s traditions and potential, Kelley revealed his distrust of its politicians and the common Americans in their sway. Holders of public office were often manipulative and hungry for power, and their constituents were ignorant and gullible, he believed. Without the vigilance of intellectually evolved people, fascism could arise at any time. Authority was always nefarious. Without his realizing it, Kelley’s suspicion of government institutions and officials mirrored that of many of his bigoted opponents.

Starting in 1946, Kelley undertook a busy schedule of lecturing to spread his views on the Nazis and build demand for his yet-to-be-completed book. (He also wrote several articles, including an unfortunately titled essay for
Collier’s
, “Squeal, Nazi, Squeal.”) He focused on speaking engagements in California, where he had many contacts who could help him obtain bookings.
Lecturing around the state, he covered a variety of topics, including
psychological factors of the Nuremberg trials, the strategy of war psychiatry, and the physiological background of recent German history.

With his book manuscript mostly complete by the end of 1946, Kelley approached many New York publishers and, to his astonishment, was rejected.
He ended up signing a contract with the Greenberg publishing firm for a meager advance of $300. Founded twenty-two years earlier by Jacob and David Greenberg, the company had a wide-ranging list, turning out Westerns, cookbooks, and gay erotica, as well as books on history, sociology, criminology, and architecture. It surely occupied a lower rung on the publishing ladder than Kelley had hoped to reach with his manuscript, but Greenberg’s offer was the best he received, and he probably believed that any publication of his book would gain attention and advance his academic career. It took months, however, for Greenberg to edit and release the book, which was titled
22 Cells in Nuremberg
. Since his book was not going to make him rich, Kelley needed a job right away.

During 1946 he tried to land a teaching job at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually he “
was offered an instructorship at the University, and was told that if he was a good boy he could become an assistant professor in about 20 years,” one of his friends and colleagues in the US Medical Corps, the neurologist Howard D. Fabing, later recalled. Kelley thought too highly of himself and his talents to accept such an offer, and he resumed his search for a position better befitting the former psychiatrist to the Nuremberg defendants.

Kelley soon found a new job 365 miles away from his home in Chattanooga, as associate professor of psychiatry at the Bowman-Gray School of Medicine, a part of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There Lloyd Thompson, his old supervisor in the US Army, had founded a department of neuropsychiatry just weeks earlier. Initially the job focused on teaching responsibilities, but within a year Kelley was back to working with patients as the director of Graylyn, the medical school’s thirty-five-bed psychiatric rehabilitation and convalescent center that opened during the summer of 1947. It occupied the Norman Revival mansion of Bowman Gray, the former president and chairman of R. J. Reynolds
Tobacco Company, and his wife Nathalie. After Bowman’s death, Nathalie and her sons had given the estate to Wake Forest University.
Visitors entered the fifty-acre estate on drives that curved among tidily trimmed lawns and gardens. Graylyn was huge and sprawling, “an English-style manor house of the type only an American with a long-accumulated bank account possibly could build,” a newsman once reported. The house was filled with ironwork, fine tiles, and expensive furnishings.

This job gave the Kelleys their first real chance to settle down since their wedding. They moved to Winston-Salem in December and found a brick house with a library large enough to accommodate Kelley’s six thousand pounds of books, which he described as one of the nation’s largest private collections of volumes on psychiatry.

As a highly regarded thirty-six-year-old psychiatrist fresh from intriguing military experiences, Kelley was Graylyn’s headliner, brought in to supervise all of the patient care. (Like the rest of the Graylyn staff, Kelley received a straight salary and did not maintain a private practice.) The university had filled the house with all sorts of testing apparatus and equipment. Graylyn could give patients a wide variety of treatments, including insulin shock therapy, occupational therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy.
Doctors could even experiment with lobotomy, the technique of psychiatric surgery that Kelley believed brought improvements ranging from “considerable” to “spectacular” to half the patients operated upon. (The use of lobotomy eventually declined worldwide because of the procedure’s significant side effects, its low actual effectiveness, and the greater benefits of psychoactive drugs.)

Kelley brought to Graylyn the group psychotherapy approach he had pioneered with traumatized service members during the war. When working with groups of patients, he displayed a mix of earnestness; all-too-apparent intelligence; and an adroitness in sketching graphs, pictures, and processes on the chalkboard. He planned to expand the treatment’s reach by erecting at Graylyn a small stage with audience seating where scenes of a new form of treatment called psychodrama could be performed. There patients acted out their anxieties for discussion by fellow patients in the audience.
The point of these group interactions was to relieve patients’ feelings of isolation. “
A neurotic person invariably thinks his problem is a unique one,” Kelley told a reporter soon after his arrival in Winston-Salem, “that no one else ever had such a problem. We point out—and other patients point out—that many persons have had the same trouble and try to show them how they can overcome their own worries.”

Under Kelley’s supervision, Graylyn accepted no “mental defectives” or psychopaths, whom he regarded as beyond the therapeutic reach of psychiatry. Most of the institution’s patients were neurotic or mildly psychotic, and Kelley felt these people could benefit most from Graylyn’s help. A small number of alcoholics would be admitted—those without psychopathic tendencies.

Although Kelley himself frequently enjoyed a drink, he did not professionally ignore the problem of alcoholism. For many years he advocated treating problem drinkers with a new compound called Antabuse, available experimentally in tiny white tablets. “No man,” Kelley declared, “
will fight through the effects of Antabuse to drink enough whiskey to make them [
sic
] drunk. Few can get beyond a first drink, once the drug has sensitized them to alcohol.” The drug reacted with alcohol in the body to form acetaldehyde and caused headaches, shortness of breath, and extreme nausea. Kelley believed that the resulting intense sickness would condition drinkers to keep their glasses empty. Antabuse, which Kelley tested at Graylyn, “guarantees that any alcoholic who sincerely is interested in a cure will find great help,” something that threats of damnation or laws restricting the sale of liquor could not accomplish, he told a reporter in 1948. Researchers could discover many other viable treatments for alcoholism if only there were enough money, and Kelley frequently proposed new taxes on liquor sales to fund such research.

General semantics, the use of words and their meanings to shape behavior, which Kelley had studied with Alfred Korzybski before the war, became part of the psychiatric toolbox at Graylyn as well. Just before Graylyn
opened, Kelley had accepted the vice presidency of the Institute of General Semantics, which Korzybski himself had founded to advance the discipline. Kelley continued to believe that general semantics was valuable in psychiatry as an approach to communicating the use of reason against emotion in the treatment of illnesses. “
We actually will retrain [patients] in thinking, so that they can intelligently and scientifically face the problems of life,” Kelley explained.

In addition to patients suffering from neuroses and mild psychoses, Graylyn admitted many discharged military veterans in need of Kelley’s expertise in treating battle-shocked fighters. In the fall of 1948 Chester S. Davis, a writer for the
Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel
, witnessed the treatment of one such patient named Jonathan Worth (probably a pseudonym that Kelley asked Davis to use), who had survived an explosion in combat on Attu in the Aleutian Islands chain of Alaska, the scene of fierce fighting in 1943 after Japanese forces occupied the island the previous year. (The Battle of Attu was the only land engagement of World War II fought on US territory.) The fighting left Worth physically unharmed but psychologically scarred, and he complained of weakness and chronic headaches while having no memory of the blast that had disabled him. He was diagnosed with psychoneurosis, indicating symptoms without organic cause, and went through a treatment regimen typical for Kelley’s Graylyn patients just out of the military. Worth received injections of insulin for three weeks, a treatment intended to produce episodes in and out of coma and a thorough rest of the patient’s mind and body. Kelley believed that insulin overdose would also sharpen Worth’s appetite, help him gain weight, and rebuild his central nervous system.

The insulin therapy left Worth feeling and looking better, but his headaches persisted. Now Kelley began the next phase of the treatment, which involved using one of his favorite antipsychotic aids. Moving the patient to his office, he gave him either sodium amytal or sodium pentothal to spiral him into the drowsiness of narco-hypnosis and played an unusual recording on a phonograph. As Worth slumped in half-sleep, the sounds of battle filled the room at high volume. Landing craft hit a rocky shoreline,
airplanes dove and shrieked, bombs whistled and pulverized their targets, and machine guns spit bullets. The noises of Attu, or something much like them, surrounded the somnolent Worth.

Suddenly he rose up on the sofa and “in a moment, Jonathan Worth began to relive the Attu landing, a matter which, until then, was a blank in his memory,” Davis wrote. Under Kelley’s prompting, Worth said he believed himself transported back to his position as a machine gunner at the front of an invading US landing craft. He was firing at Japanese positions on the shore, and he saw many soldiers fall under his attack. After he landed, however, he discovered that the “enemies” he had killed were really US soldiers. He approached them and saw that one looked like his father. Overcome by shock, he collapsed on a heap of rocks and was later taken to a hospital.

“When Jonathan was free from his drug sleep, Dr. Kelley talked to him,” Davis wrote, “made him see that what he had done was accidental and that his feelings of guilt were normal enough but unnecessary.” Sent back to his room to recuperate, Worth found that headaches still troubled him. Kelley turned his attention to Worth’s relationship with his father. He considered it unlikely that the dead soldier really looked like the elder Worth, and Kelley wanted to understand why the machine gunner had superimposed his father’s face on the slain man’s. In psychotherapy sessions, Kelley learned that Worth’s father was a drunk who treated his wife and son violently “and, on occasion, backhanded baby Jonathan halfway across the room,” Davis wrote. Worth grew up professing love for the man while harboring murderous feelings toward him.

“Doctor Kelley reconstructs the story in this fashion,” Davis recounted. “When Jonathan hit the actual beach and ran toward the huddle of bodies, he had two shocks—first, that he had killed Americans, and second, to protect himself from that blow, he told himself that he had killed the one man he had always wanted to kill, his father. The treatment, with these facts in hand, was easy enough.” Kelley suggested to Worth that his father deserved his hatred, and that Worth had indeed hated him. Worth’s angry feelings toward his parent were completely normal and justified, Kelley
said. “Once this lesson was accepted consciously, Jonathan’s muscle tensions relaxed, the powerful cords of the neck released their grip on the base of the skull and Jonathan Worth felt the merciful relief of life without a driving headache.” ( John Hersey recounted an astonishingly similar tale of recovery from wartime trauma using narco-hypnosis in “A Short Talk with Erlanger,” a
LIFE
magazine article published in October 1945.)