Madness in Cold War America

Alexander Dunst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367264000
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317360797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America's political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia's superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.

1 Introduction

Cold War Madness

Introducing a new edition of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Sean Wilentz returned to essays penned half a century earlier to intervene in a presidential contest. Wilentz, an advisor to Hillary Clinton, lashed out both against liberals within the Democratic Party and conservative Republicans. The former he accused, simply, of “left-wing paranoia.” As for Republicans, they fell prey to a simplistic moralism and suffered from what he described as a “Manichean political psychology.”¹ Wilentz’s use of psychiatric terminology for political ends rehashed debates originally conducted at the height of the Cold War. His fellow historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his essay on the paranoid style shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and aimed his ire at Barry Goldwater, Lyndon B. Johnson’s contender for the presidency. Such vocabulary may, in effect, accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental failure or error of judgment, for which these terms provide welcome metaphors in America’s news media, or in everyday conversation. Thus, not only individuals may be accused of madness: political parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and entire social groups, are routinely demonized as paranoid, or their behavior dismissed as schizophrenic.

This study tells the story of how madness came to play such a prominent part in political and cultural debates. Although individual illness or clinical psychosis feature at length, what follows is not a history of psychiatry, or a medical account of madness. Rather what interests me are cases where madness becomes social and, therefore, political. What seems remarkable about the political deployment of psychiatric concepts is their description of both friend and foe—their equal application to self and other. The casual usage of this terminology does not imply vagueness of meaning, or an absence of ideological import. Describing a film or an artistic style, a group or persuasion as mad participates in a precise political, cultural, and intellectual history. One of the central arguments of this book is that today’s culture of madness in the United States can be understood only in the context of the Cold War. Social pathology gains its rhetorical force amid the violent confrontation between communism and capitalism and functions as an intellectual weapon in the internal power struggles that ensue. As Martin Halliwell suggests, Cold War anti-communism was characterized by a “rhetoric of disease.”² Its long-standing association with immorality meant that insanity lent itself to attacks like not other illness.

Since the 1990s, revisionist research within historiography and literary studies has transformed our understanding of postwar social science, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, the 1950s and ’60s counterculture, as well as postmodern literature, film, and criticism.³ Even where the focus lies on madness—whether in a paranoid conspiracy culture or antipsychiatry’s romance with schizophrenia—a tendency to read these registers in separation means that the force field of dialogue and debate that connects them goes unnoticed. To read countercultural madness at a remove from liberal pathologies of the left and right deprives it of its immediate adversaries and gives rise to simplistic caricatures. The fundamental ambivalence of countercultural celebrations becomes visible only as a reaction to what surrounds it. Novelists like Marge Piercy and Leslie Marmon Silko, the psychologist Phyllis Chesler, and a social movement like mental patients’ liberation, seek respite from the dismissal of alternative selves. At the same time, they return to psychopathology at every juncture, or oppose demonization with facile romanticism.⁴

The application of psychopathology beyond the individual mind does not begin in the United States, nor does it first appear after World War II. At least since Sigmund Freud, who famously based his understanding of paranoia on the autobiography of a judge instead of a case study, and who analyzed literature, the masses, and religion with equal gusto, have such uses become widespread.⁵ It is with the popular adaptation of this thought in mid-century America, in which European influences combine with a diverse US tradition, that psychology establishes itself as a privileged framework for understanding all aspects of modern life. Psychopathology breaks free from its ties to the medical profession and social elites. Mad vocabulary seeps into everyday life. In the process, the boundaries between neurosis and psychosis, between unconscious motivations and surface manifestations, blur. Pathological symptoms no longer express individual illness but may now refer to social types or even to the arts and rhetoric. The Cold War gives birth to the paranoid style and pronounces itself mad. I will say more about diagnosing communists and conservatives later on but begin by explaining my insistence on madness—a notion some may find outdated. Before turning to psychiatry in detail, I summarize the evolution of cultural pathology throughout the Cold War, then take a brief look at developments after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1.1 More than Mental Illness

An understanding of madness as illness dominated mainstream accounts during the Cold War. Madness appeared as a form of thought and behavior partially or wholly devoid of reason, or lacking the subjective agency seen to result from the exercise of reason. Adapted from clinical psychiatry as it developed from the work of Emil Kraepelin and others, the notion of madness as pathology functions as a central cultural and intellectual resource in the popular imagination. This holds true across the political spectrum and includes postwar liberals, leftists of different persuasions, and moderate to right-wing Republicans. The actual terminology varies and is, in fact, used quite interchangeably. Even highly educated observers like the critic Leslie Fielder or the diplomat George Kennan, who inspired the containment doctrine in the late 1940s, wildly mixed their metaphors. With Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” sent from Moscow during his stint at the US embassy, and the psychological assessment of negotiators in Korea, Cold War madness influenced decision-making at the highest level and entered the world stage. Communist leaders found themselves diagnosed as schizoid, paranoid, hysterical, or plain crazy—often all at once.⁶

Despite rhetorical variation, two conceptions dominate. Schizophrenia and paranoia constitute two of the three psychoses identified by Kraepelin and function as shorthand for different aspects of madness. Yet, the third psychosis, mania—or what became subsumed under manic depression and today goes as bipolar disorder—appears in postwar literature as well. The characteristic pendulum swing between depressive and manic episodes and the habit of over-diagnosing schizophrenia often led to the identification with either the former or depression. Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1946) and Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), provide two examples analyzed here. Due to these symptoms, mania frequently remains absent from the popular use and academic appropriation that characterize the two others. In popular and academic usage, schizophrenia signifies reason’s disintegration, which reflects the origin of the term as a splitting of the psychic functions in the writing of Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler.⁷ This understanding of madness is then appropriated for a perceived disintegration of social order. John Frankenheimer’s satire The Manchurian Candidate (1962), for instance, repeatedly invokes the threat of madness, and the infiltration of the political establishment in the film denotes a failure of ideological cohesion.

A related yet distinct understanding of madness sees it as a partial impairment of rational insight. Motivated by an attempt to understand mass democracy, powerful social scientists and historians like Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., accused the left at home and abroad of irresponsible paranoia. Their work built on mid-century psychology, particularly The Authoritarian Personality, co-authored by Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno. This insanity stems from an excess of emotion: anger or suspicion warping a correct understanding of reality. More rarely, paranoia results from exaggerated and abstract thought processes that become disconnected from basic facts. Hofstadter leveled the same accusations against the rising tide of conservatism that threatened the liberal consensus during the 1950s and ’60s. Deprecating political adversaries as irrational depends, of course, on a positive valuation of reason. Here lies one of the central fault lines separating postwar liberalism from the emerging counterculture and social movements of the Sixties. Authors who doubt reason itself and reject postwar society for an emphasis on emotion and authenticity, endorse and celebrate its absence.

Driven by scientific optimism and large increases in funding, postwar America saw a steady expansion in mental health care, epitomized by Kennedy becoming the first US president to address Congress on the topic.⁸ Psychiatry’s radical critics, most influentially Thomas S. Szasz, exploited the growing disconnection between biological medicine and psychoanalytic treatment, and accused it of an ideologically driven repression of dissent. Chapter 3 discusses and other polemical attacks contributed to a self-help psychology that provided non-medical alternatives, and sometimes direct contestation. At the outer reaches of the movement, the question that animated liberal reformers, namely how to better care for the mentally ill, was transformed into something entirely different: a conception of madness that sought healing in a liberation from psychiatry and proclaimed madness the only true sanity in an insane world. Such criticism also contributed to the drastic reorientation of institutional psychiatry in the United States. Turning their back on depth psychology, psychiatrists began to pursue a biochemical and genetic research program that, ironically, shares much with Szasz’s conservative libertarianism.

The literary counterculture posed a second challenge to psychiatry. Chapter 4 documents how these writers supplemented attacks on state power with biting satire and an aesthetics of rebellion. Paranoia held special appeal in this respect. Ishmael Reed and Thomas Pynchon are two of many authors who envisioned paranoia as a subversive epistemology that countered the Cold War politics of secrecy, lies, and psychological warfare. Tobin Siebers and Ann Douglas contend that postmodern literature responds to the increasing gap between available and necessary knowledge brought about by the national security state.⁹ In the absence of political change, the paranoid belief in conspiracy holds the only hope for Oedipa Maas, the female protagonist of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): either as a desire for knowledge or as a diversion from its impossibility. The analysis of Cold War thrillers in chapter 5 moves from Pynchon’s novel to the extraordinary series of conspiracy films that flowered in the early 1970s, including Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Throughout my reading, I argue that many Sixties reversals remain fundamentally ambivalent. Celebrations of paranoia and schizophrenia coexist with dominant pathologies of madness.

In contrast to some countercultural authors, I do not conceive of madness as necessarily progressive—the marker of a positive freedom or individual authenticity. My discussion of paranoia equally steers clear of simplistic condemnation and celebration. If paranoia amounts to partial impairment, it also provides a measure of insight. Paranoia’s detection of a structure of authority or oppression, I contend, speaks the truth of society—its structural responsibility, or the unbroken interrelation between all constituents of the symbolic universe—and transforms it into the existence of conspiracy. But in the meaning instituted by their portraits of power, conspiracy theories also strengthen the belief in an authority whose potential disintegration is announced in the need for paranoid certainty. Paradoxically, paranoid narratives simultaneously expose social antagonism and reinforce the status quo. Over the last two decades, scholars of America’s conspiracy culture have challenged its conflation with a dangerous insanity and radically altered the way we look at these narratives. Yet these studies balance their reassessment of conspiracy theories with the continued abnegation of paranoia. In so doing, they follow in the footsteps of a political and intellectual tradition that discredited opponents by associating them with madness.

Szasz famously declared mental illness a myth.¹⁰ My insistence on the term madness does not deny the existence of mental illness, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people, but refuses the reduction of the former to the latter. The perspective adopted throughout this study owes much to the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan who wrote: “Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”¹¹ So accepted has the identification of madness as disease become that any other perspective seems almost beyond the pale. However, it is contradicted by some relatively well-known facts: in most countries, a stable proportion of the population, around one percent, receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia. About ten times as many experience hallucinations, without feeling ill or seeking treatment. Diagnosed schizophrenics often view their hallucinations as a valuable part of their lives and don’t want them suppressed by antipsychotic drugs. Other studies have failed to distinguish the delusional beliefs of mental patients from those held by followers of new age religions, who do not consider themselves ill either.¹²

A strictly medical perspective ignores many practical aspects of madness. The first concerns the success or failure of biological psychiatry, measured not in small or large scientific breakthroughs but in its effect on the US population. At the end of the Cold War, a report estimated that only one in five Americans with serious mental illness was receiving adequate care. Twic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Cold War Madness
• 2 The Pathologies of Dissent: Constructing the Cold War Psyche
• 3 Practical Cures: From Radical Psychiatry to Self Help
• 4 A Sane Madness? Psychosis and Cold War Countercultures
• 5 Paranoid Narrative: Writing the Secret History of the Cold War
• 6 A Schizophrenic Postmodernity: Literary Studies and the Politics of Critique
• Index