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.