The Caine Mutiny Court Martial

Today the grandchildren of that generation are not much interested in psychoanalysis. Voegelinian analysis of pneumopathology certainly provides a superior tool for Voegelin readers. For a wider public a strong argument can be made that a psychology based on doing good and avoiding evil is more useful to the individual than trying to recover forgotten childhood experiences in order to explain unhappiness. The facultative psychology of the Scholastics, most notably in the work of St. Thomas, may be the best path to emotional well-being.

In any event, we no longer have a shared psychological vocabulary at hand as we had with psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise. Voegelin did point out that Freudian psychoanalysis was a reaction against Positivism, and that insofar as Freud looked beneath the surface, he was going in the right direction. He had rediscovered the soul. Then Freud was disestablished by a number of successful criticisms, including Philip Rieff’s Freud, the Mind of a Moralist, which Voegelin particularly admired. Among other things, Rieff analyzed Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and showed how inconvenient passages in the Old Testament had been ignored to make the argument appear persuasive.

Psychoanalysis had also been used to threaten and coerce people. One could hardly find a better account of this in turn-of-the-century Vienna than Thomas Szasz’ Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors. Most importantly, people eventually noticed that, as a science, Freudian psychoanalysis offered little predictive value and limited healing power. And then along came drugs to help people with emotional problems and depth psychoanalysis receded even further into the cultural background. But psychoanalysis did offer great entertainment value, whether at a cocktail party or on the stage or in film.

Now to the movie. In the 1954 Hollywood production of The Caine Mutiny, Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, Captain of a destroyer-minesweeper engaged in combat in the Pacific theatre during World War II, is relieved by his subordinate officers because they believe he is incapable of exercising rational command during the crisis of a typhoon at sea. Back in the United States, these subordinates are tried before a general court martial on a charge of mutiny, which upon conviction, carries a penalty of death. A psychiatrist appears as a prosecution witness and testifies that in his opinion Captain Queeg is sane. The psychiatrist is then cross-examined, resulting in one of the better court room sequences found in film. (In the film’s denouement, it is argued that had the crew shown loyalty to Captain Queeg instead of attempting to psychoanalyze him, there would have been no crisis at sea and no court martial.)

Whether the personality-type suggested by a Captain Queeg resembles one or more current or past politicians and whether psychoanalytic categories remain useful is left for the reader to consider—all in a tongue-in-cheek spirit, of course!