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In 1943, the army psychiatrist George S. Goldman began to develop a series of documentaries that could “contribute to mental health” by “removing some of the mystery connected with psychiatry and by properly explaining many of the misconceptions commonly connected with this specialty.” The hope was that such films would help rehabilitate affected veterans and also prevent future psychiatric casualties, and, in the process, that they would solidify the military’s reputation as a “healthful” set of institutions—or, at the very least, as institutions capable of providing effective psychiatric treatment for those in need. Because the so-called neuropsychiatric problem had become so large, threatening to “amount to the largest medical-social problem this country [had] ever faced,” documentary film was deemed necessary as a flexible instrument of education, rehabilitation, and public relations. Because the resulting films dealt with “death and the fear of death,” they were deemed widely relevant, particularly during the nuclear age. Their “focus is on the wartime patient,” noted a 1953 manual, “but the psychodynamics portrayed are generally applicable,” making these films helpful for the population at large. The postwar passage of the National Mental Health Act (1946) and the emergence of a bona fide mental health movement seemed to confirm this power, as government and civilian agencies continued to find new uses for the documentaries.

Trauma-themed military documentaries served a variety of promotional purposes—many of them strictly corporate—during and after World War II. These experiments in institutional advertising, with their emphasis on the therapeutic dimensions of extensive militarization, were hardly limited to the postwar period. In a fundamental sense, they originated with the military’s wartime efforts to contain widespread concerns regarding war trauma—efforts that met the militant tone of certain orientation films with a more measured, even somber reflection on the psychic costs of combat.

Focusing on World War II and its immediate aftermath, this chapter offers a genealogy of a particular documentary tendency, one tied to the concurrent rise of military psychiatry and of the military-industrial state. As the psychiatric treatment of combat-traumatized soldiers gained greater institutional and cultural visibility, so did particular techniques associated with—but scarcely limited to—documentary film. This chapter looks at some of the subjectivities—some of the “private visions” and “careerist goals”—of military psychiatrists and other psychological experts whose influence is abundantly evident in a range of “documentary endeavors,” including those carried out (often simultaneously) by Hollywood studios and various military filmmaking outfits, from the Signal Corps Photographic Center to the Training Films and Motion Picture Branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane asylums, or in suicidal behavior. Historians have not focused on Civil War participants as victims of war trauma until recently. This chapter deepens our understanding of these experiences by asserting that external war-related pressures like witnessing death and mayhem combined with internal pressures like fear of masculine failure or being called a coward heavily taxed soldiers and their psyches. Factors that contributed to psychological distress among Confederate servicemen include: exposure to battle, fear of being called a coward, fear of failure, youthfulness, homesickness, and depression.Suicide offered southern white men a way to maintain mastery and control over their deaths in war zones where chaos and disorder prevailed. Attitudes toward Confederates who killed themselves during the war were more supportive and less stigmatizing than one might think. Many soldiers also ended up institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed as insane. Caregivers and family members rarely connected signs of mental distress with wartime experiences.

This chapter examines the rise of “psychodrama,” with its insistence on the importance of performing one’s own traumatic past, in the growing field of military psychiatry. Developed by the Austrian-American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, psychodrama was a technique that required both acting and reenacting, both imagination and memory. Moving beyond the hospital, drama teams increasingly embraced activities performed in specific sites of trauma—a psychotherapeutic turn that anticipated major developments in documentary film.

The introduction considers some of the consequential intersections between Freudian psychoanalysis, military psychiatry, and documentary film in a period that predated the codification of war trauma as PTSD. At stake in its reevaluation of wartime and postwar military media is a broader understanding of how war trauma and psychotherapy were articulated in and through documentary and realist film. Situated at the intersection of trauma studies and documentary studies, the introduction considers some of the historically specific debates about, aspirations for, and uses of documentary as a vehicle for honoring, monitoring, understanding, publicizing, and even “working through” war trauma, while occasionally conceding trauma’s contradictory and intractable character.

Lays out blueprint for the book by outlining methodological approaches, evidence base, and historiographical interventions (including ‘dark turn’ in Civil War scholarship) of a study on suicide and suffering during and after the Civil War in the American South. Identifies evidentiary challenges including poor record keeping, attempts to hide suicides, elusiveness of cause or motivation, and gender bias in lethal suicides. Case studies emphasize experiences of individuals, transcending well-trodden theological and cultural discourse about suicide. Examines impact of war traumas like PTSD on soldiers and veterans, and on their wives and families. Racialized ideas about suicide and depression shaped southerners’ understanding of suffering, held by whites to be a marker of civilized peoples.

This chapter explores Stoic conceptions of fear and resilience. It assesses the notion of replacing fear with a sage's rational caution, and the cost in terms of acknowledging human vulnerability. Both Seneca and Cicero, in quite different ways, shed light on understanding these fears. This chapter also illustrates some concrete examples of fear in battle and considers both the fear of killing and being killed and the challenge of transitioning from the role of soldier to civilian. Finally, this chapter discusses contemporary notions of war trauma and the insights ancient Stoicism sheds on the nature of resilience in the face of extreme terror and stress.

Chapter one examines Chandler’s biography to question the established view of the author’s life and war experience. By employing a psychological sketch of Chandler’s experience during World War One, fresh new insights into his writing, war trauma, and characterization can be gleaned.

Chapter three considers the relationship between detective fiction and war fiction and the impact of one style upon the other to create a ‘war noir’. Taking examples from renowned World War One novels, it will demonstrate that the same disillusionment and despair prevalent in the work of the renowned Lost Generation is equally prevalent in Chandler’s novels. Reading his novels as a convergence of the war novel and crime fiction, one can reconsider Chandler’s work as a legitimate representation of society and the trauma of war.

This concluding chapter traces the emergence of a different solution from literature to tensions in public memory, in light of the enormous, enduring significance of war victory as a usable past for the Soviet regime; indeed, it was precisely through allusions to the harm to this usable past—and the consequent harm to ideological mobilization—that both terror and war trauma would be marginalized within Soviet public memory in the second half of the 1960s. The chapter analyzes the contestation over the cult of personality, playing out over the second half of the 1960s, and ultimately resulting in its extreme marginalization—if not total elimination—from Soviet discourse and public memory.

This chapter examines two documentaries about war trauma—War Neuroses: Netley, 1917, Seale Hayne Military Hospital 1918 and Let There Be Light—to explore the ways in which nonfiction film, with its assertion of the knowability of the world, may also be a “document of the real” in Lacan’s sense. The first documentary shows the treatment of soldiers who suffered from “shell shock” during World War I while the second presents the treatment of the trauma symptoms of soldiers in the United States during World War II. The chapter also discusses the excesses of signifying in what is shown and what is said in a factual film.

This chapter addresses the central theme, the human story behind the military history: how the refugee population of Wuhan, in coping with the traumas of war, forced positive social changes and actions by the state. The Anti-Japanese War did not produce a Chinese Tolstoy. Instead, the poets, woodblock carvers, and foreign observers best captured the horror and desperation of the refugee experience. The impact of the war on refugees was not just economic and social; it was also profoundly psychological. Old ties of family and geography were torn asunder. Marriages dissolved, prostitution increased, and uncertainty spawned desperate romance.

In addition to Marlowe, Chandler’s other veteran characters also unwittingly suffer post-traumatic symptoms, and chapter six is an exploration of the most significant of Chandler’s novels and the work that best represents his protagonist as a veteran, The Long Goodbye (1953). Examining Marlowe’s behaviour around, and attitude towards, the two veterans identified in the novel, Roger Wade and Terry Lennox, it is argued that Marlowe becomes part of a “band of brothers,” an intimate group of veterans in whose company the detective displays the undeniable evidence of his past experiences and trauma.

This chapter investigates if we have moved into a postnational period in which the institution of interstate war, one of the primary mechanisms of nation-state formation and reproduction, has become outmoded and in which global norms are superseding national ones. It explores the significance of the decline of mass-conscription armies in favour of professional specialists, of wars of choice dedicated to humanitarian missions, the phenomenon of ‘new’ or intrastate wars, and the growing emphasis on the victims and traumas of war. It examines the challenges posed by global religious movements. It argues, however, that many contemporary conflicts are a product of imperial legacies of weak states lacking legitimacy, and that coalitions of nation states remain central to defending conceptions of world order. Moreover, while heroic ideas of war may seem outmoded, the perception of war as traumatic may itself contribute to national solidarities.

Chapter four explores how the symptoms of war trauma have been transferred onto Chandler’s protagonist Philip Marlowe. Marlowe’s character traits will be closely examined by considering certain notable features such as the detective’s origins, characterization, disillusionment and his chivalric code of honour. Like Chandler, it becomes possible to identify the small but distinctive aspects of Marlowe’s character that suggest that he was a psychologically damaged war veteran fighting new battles on a different front.