Victory in the second world war was celebrated as a triumph of democracy, but in private many policy makers were worried about the implications of the analysis of the soldiers. It seemed to show that underneath every American were irrational violent drives. What had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out. The complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war showed just how easily these forces could break through and overwhelm democracy.
Ellen Herman - Historian of American Psychology: Planners and policy makers had been convinced by their experiences during World War II that human beings could act very irrationally because of this sort of teeming and raw and unpredictable emotionality. The kind of chaos that lived at the base of human personality could in fact infect the society social institutions to such a point that the society itself would become sick. That's what they believe happened in Germany n which the irrational, the anti-democratic went wild. It is a vision of human nature as incredibly destructive and they were terrified Americans would in fact behave that way or were capable of behaving that way and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.
Professor Martin Bergmann - Psychoanalyst, US Army 1943-45: So what is needed is a human being that can internalize democratic values so they are not shaken with the storm and psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done. It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structures of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital free supporter and maintainer of democracy.