The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (6 page)

This precocious boy—increasingly certain in his intellectual judgments and commanding in his confidence—soon came to the attention of Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist who was starting a study of the lives of highly intelligent California children. Keenly aware of her son’s intellectual distinction, June took him to Terman’s numerous examinations and appraisal sessions.
Douglas’s measured IQ was lofty enough, above 135, to qualify him for inclusion in the study, and he and Terman regularly corresponded for the next four decades as part of the psychologist’s drive to find out if exceptionally bright children grew into exceptionally bright adults.
Terman kept close tabs on all of his subjects as they grew into adulthood, but he came to regard Kelley as one of the most intriguing and puzzling of
the 1,444 children in the study.

By the time Douglas was fifteen
he had amassed collections of wildflowers, fungi, and lichens; was a leader of his Boy Scout troop (and would soon become an Eagle Scout); joined his high school’s debating society and served as the president of its botany club; and earned money on a lumber crew and as a worker in the school cafeteria. The boy was ardent in his intellectual pursuits, something of a brain beast. He was driven to succeed, to amass and classify knowledge, and to dominate all his challenges.

Years later, even Douglas’s young children perceived his need to master everything he tried and make sure others recognized his mastery. Sometime
in his teens he took up the hobby of stage magic, a pastime well suited for a boy intent upon impressing others. Whether performing with cards, tricks, or other illusions, the stage magician controls where his audience looks and what it perceives. From simple tricks learned from magazines and manuals, Douglas advanced to more complicated illusions. His interest in magic intensified as a premedical student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. The school’s newspaper published amused accounts of magic stunts he promoted and staged for as many of his fellow students as would come watch.
These feats included driving a car around campus while he was blindfolded and hooded, a stunt that Berkeley’s police chief apparently approved of, but found dangerous enough to comment “on the dangers both to Kelley and passing traffic in downtown districts.”
Kelley emulated Harry Houdini in public demonstrations by escaping from handcuffs while encased in a mail sack and an ironclad sea chest, performed magic at club events and dinners, and printed business cards promoting his skills at sleight of hand. Later he served as
president of the San Francisco Society of Magicians. As Kelley himself noted later,
working as a magician strengthens the performer’s self-confidence and gives him a feeling of superiority over his audience. He soon learned that well-educated people—those trained to accept suggestions from others, surrender their attention, and arrive at conclusions from observation—were the most astounded folks in the audience at a magic show when a trick defied their expectations. He also glimpsed the downside of the illusion: the audience enjoyed the marvel, but the magician carried the knowledge that it was no more than a trick, a clever deceit.

As Douglas matured, he drew ever closer to his mother’s commanding personality and fell out of his father’s orbit. 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 of
a 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, and
he 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 as
the 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 state
of 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 subject’s personality came through in any response, no matter how much that person tried to disguise or distort it.

Introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the inkblot test had gained considerable influence in psychiatry, and later in psychology, as a tool for the investigation of individual personality. (It retains its high status in psychology to this day.) Until the 1960s, when standardized methods of interpreting Rorschach data gained traction, the value of the test depended on the skill and experience of the interpreter in drawing conclusions from the results. Kelley met and grew professionally close to Bruno Klopfer, a leader in championing the Rorschach test in the United States, and by all accounts Kelley was supremely talented as an interpreter. “
The method must always be considered an aid to diagnosis and not complete in itself,” he wrote. “It is a technique, which when properly used, adds to the armamentarium of the psychiatrist by giving
him an additional objective method of diagnosis.” He sometimes likened gathering Rorschach results to slicing a thin piece of pie. “
And as any pie eater knows, one thin slice gives a good idea of what the whole pie is like,” he said.

Use of the Rorschach eventually spread beyond the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders to applications by the government, the military, companies, and anyone interested in determining the personality type of a prospective employee, a person seeking security clearance, or someone in search of a good career fit. But the Rorschach was only approaching wide use during the 1930s and early 1940s, when Kelley took a leading role in advancing it. In 1942 he and Klopfer published
The Rorschach Technique
, a detailed guide to administering and interpreting the test. Kelley’s contribution to the book focused on the use of the Rorschach in clinical settings.

Equally fascinating to Kelley was the emerging study of general semantics, a field developed in 1933 by an eccentric engineer, physicist, and former Polish count named Alfred Korzybski. Bald, possessed of a searching gaze and the hands of a wrestler, and frequently fingering a cigarette in a long holder, the imposing Korzybski proposed a method of thinking that he believed would end stupidity and promote sanity, especially in people’s relationships with one another. He placed high importance on the principle of “time-binding,” the ability of our species to pass along collective knowledge from one generation to the next. Emotional and irrational thinking makes time-binding difficult or impossible, stunting human progress. Korzybski formalized these ideas in his influential book,
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
, much of which he wrote in his home study with
two pet monkeys sitting on his lap.

Eager to apply these ideas to psychiatry, Kelley became a devotee of Korzybski and his new science. Kelley saw general semantics as the study of the communication and preservation of higher ideas. “
This communication must be free and mutual, or persons and nations will lead themselves to self destruction by regression to an animal status,” he explained.
“Maintenance and progress of higher ideas are the main distinction between human beings and animals.” He explored many applications of general semantics to clinical psychiatry. Unlike animals, who react to stimuli but cannot think of rational explanations for them, humans have the ability to change their behavior by understanding causes, circumstances, and solutions. A soldier may grow conditioned to battlefield danger by becoming cripplingly anxious whenever he hears loud noises, but the therapeutic use of general semantics in his case would persuade him that those sounds are perilous only in certain environments and from specific sources. Rational thinking can often overcome the harmful results of emotional reactions. Similarly, a skilled debater can persuade an opponent, not by arguing aggressively, but by listening carefully, pinpointing the opponent’s emotional thinking, and determining what compels the adversary to behave as he does. Solving differences, Kelley maintained, is much easier when one understands the signals that drive others.

Kelley’s passion for magic intensified. By the mid-1930s
he had become an officer in the august Society of American Magicians and had authored several instructional articles in
GENII
, a magazine for conjurers. One described how to use false shuffling to make an audience member unknowingly pick four aces out of a deck of cards, and he introduced readers to such other stunts as “The Kelley Gamble-Trophy Trick” (another card trick), the “City Desk Trick” (a feat of mentalism), and “Let Him Guess” (a prop trick). “
Long before the name psychology was on everybody’s tongue,” Kelley wrote, “magicians employed its principles under the term misdirection.”

He sparked Korzybski’s interest in magic, which the Pole often invoked when trying to explain the principles of general semantics. Magic tricks, Korzybski said, no longer deceive us when we understand
their workings. The shell-and-pea game loses its magic when we see how the pea is concealed inside the shell. “A matter of structure,” Korzybski said. “And as you know, all of science is a search for structure. When we understand the structure of something then we avoid deception and self-deception. That is one reason why I work to explain the structure of common experiences—war included—and language. But it is not obvious to the naked eye.”

Douglas Kelley studied for three years in New York and wrote his Columbia dissertation on using the Rorschach test to assess alcoholics. He took a series of personality and vocational tests during this time. In one vocational appraisal, he scored poorly in the categories that measured fitness for such occupations as psychologist, architect, and engineer, and best matched the test’s parameters for real estate salesman and such solitary pursuits as farmer, printer, musician, and author. Kelley’s self-confidence allowed him to ignore the profile’s suggestions when he made his next career move in 1941, to manage the psychiatric ward at the San Francisco Psychopathic Hospital, an institution affiliated with the University of California Medical School, where he also accepted an instructorship in psychiatry.