UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation focuses on the imbrications of the US military and the history of psychiatric medicine. Across each of the three chapters, spanning the end of WWII and into the early Cold War era, I follow the transits of US psychiatry as it emerges from WWII as a “field with a social mission” and expands concomitant with US imperial ascendancy. I demonstrate how psychiatry had an important, but somewhat overlooked role, in the growth of military Keynesianism and the reach of the welfare-warfare state. Attending to the development of psychiatric nomenclature in WWII and the transit of psychiatric knowledge from sites of war into the psychiatric profession more broadly, indicates the ways psychiatry promises optimization of the human body and mind. Across each of the three chapters, I show how this promise is diffused across public life and relies on linearity, charting a liberal progress narrative that situates health and wellness as goods to be secured through adherence to state sanctioned values of productivity, efficiency, and heteronormative models of family life.