Doctor interviewing crying soldier again:
Soldier: "(crying) I'm not doing this deliberately please believe me."
Doctor: "This display of emotion is sometimes very helpful."
Soldier: "I hope so, sir."
Doctor: "Sure, it gets it off your chest"
Soldier: "Well sir, to be perfectly honest with you I'm very much in love with my sweetheart. She has been the one person that gave me a sense of importance in that through her cooperation with me we were able to surmount so many obstacles."
The psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud to take the men back into their pasts. They became convinced that the breakdowns were not the direct result of the fighting. The stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories. These were memories of the men's own violent feelings and desires which they had repressed because they were too frightening. To the psychoanalyst it was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory that underneath human beings were driven by primitive irrational forces.
Professor Martin Bergmann - Psychoanalyst, US Army 1943-45: World War II was a major shattering experience because I discovered the enormous role of the irrational in the life of most people. Now that I can say that I learned that the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America is very much in favor of the irrational. That there's much greater unhappiness, much more suffering, it's much more a sad country than one would imagine from the advertisements that you made, a much more problematic country