The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai Read Free Book Online

Doc rarely asked young Douglas about his reading or the scientific experiments and Boy Scout activities that occupied his time. Intellectually, Douglas was a cross between a sponge and a rampaging bull, but Doc didn’t seem to understand his son’s passions. In addition, measured against the McGlashan clan, Doc was an underachiever, a man content to ply his trade and display his cheerful disposition, itself proof that he lacked the brooding and furious drive ofa great man. Douglas observed his father’s straightforwardness and good nature and believed they made him appear weak. McGlashans never felt satisfied to drift along in life; they were driven to rise to the top, master their situations, and assert their superiority. They controlled their realms. Douglas absorbed that approach to living from June, and he never strayed from it.
    Charles McGlashan died on January 6, 1931—at the very end, he longed to see June, who was herself bedridden with illness—and Nona followed him to the grave three years later. Within another few years the spectacular McGlashan house in Truckee burned down, and the Rocking Stone tower, spared by the flames, was razed. Worst of all, the stone itself had stopped rocking.Guardians of the property had filled the rocking space to prevent the tippy boulder from crushing visitors. The magic of the estate had completely gone.
    Douglas Kelley went on to medical school at UC Berkeley and graduated at the age of twenty-four. Now five feet eight and a half inches tall, ruddy, and solidly built, he had wanted to be a brain surgeon, but he believed his hands were too small to conquer that specialty. So he turned instead to psychiatry, perhaps, as family legend maintained, because he knew the McGlashans were a pack of loons. He excelled in the discipline and earned a yearlong postgraduate Rockefeller Institute Fellowship at Columbia University, which led to his doctor of medical sciences degree from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941. There he spent hours at the New York Psychiatric Hospital. His research in New York opened Kelley to much new thinking on the workings of the mind and covered a wide range of territory, andhe collaborated with colleagues to discover a skin test for sensitivity to alcohol consumption, much like tests already in use to measure reactions to allergens. He also dabbled in arcane and strange studies on such topics asthe effect of the full moon on the behavior of mental patients, which he reported in The Psychoanalytic Review .
    More influential on his career was his exposure to the relatively new Rorschach inkblot test, which offered insights into the psychiatric stateof patients by allowing trained clinicians to interpret their responses to a standardized set of ten cards showing symmetrical, abstract patterns of ink, some in shades of gray and some in color. In themselves, the inkblots showed nothing. Whatever subjects saw in them, therefore, were projections of their inner personalities.
    “The average individual gives from two to five responses to each ink-blot,” noted a magazine article of the era. “Ten or more indicate ambition—a hard driving toward success, a resolve to succeed by quantity in case sheer quality isn’t enough. Fewer than two responses, especially if these are vague and ill-defined, denote the individual who was bound up in himself, lacking ideas and imagination. But when a small number of responses is clean cut, clearly seen and accurately reported, it reveals the skilled and confident individual. He knows what he wants and goes after it.” During a test period of about an hour, evaluators typically recorded exactly what a subject said about the inkblots, scrutinizing not only the content of the responses, but whether the subject focused on the whole inkblot image or only part of it, and the number of animals, humans, fantasy figures, and other images discerned in the picture. Cheating was impossible, Kelley believed; the