The analysis seemed to be a great success and in the thirties the Burlingham children returned to America. Hey settled down to happy married lives in the suburbs. What they didn't realize was that their experience was about to become a template for a giant social experiment to control the inner mental life of the American population.
In 1946 President Truman signed The National Mental Health Act. It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears. The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society.
Newsreel voiceover: Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally unstable revealed by the World War II draft figures, Congress in 1946 passed The National Mental Health Act which recognized for the first time that mental illness was a national problem. Keenly aware of the tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H Felix, director of the vast new project. Dr Felix: A primary objective of The National Mental Health program is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge about mental health and about mental illness. We're not doing this. Why? Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.
Two of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers Carl and Will. Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments and now he and his brother begun to train hundreds of new psychiatrists. The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna Freud's ideas on a wide scale and to adults as well as children. The psychiatrists job would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control their unconscious drives. Psychoanalysis could be used to make a better society.