Uncle Sam Doesn't Need
You!
After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the
guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the
army deferred people for some reason other than physical
first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but now
they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.
That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in
Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some
distance -- I think it was to Albany -- to take the physical.
I get to the draft place, and I'm handed a lot of forms to fill out,
and then I start going around to all these different booths. They
check your vision at one, your hearing at another, they take
your blood sample at another, and so forth.
Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There
you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I'm waiting
I can see what is happening. There are three desks, with a
psychiatrist behind each one, and the "culprit" sits across from
the psychiatrist in his BVDs and answers various questions.
At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For
example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to
be a great piano player has her hands stuck in some awkward
position and she can't move them, and her family calls in a
psychiatrist to try to help her, and the psychiatrist goes
upstairs into a room with her, and you see the door close behind
them, and downstairs the family is discussing what's going to
happen, and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck
in the horrible position, walks dramatically down the stairs
over to the piano and sits down, lifts her hands over the
keyboard, and suddenly -- dum diddle dum diddle dum, dum,
dum -- she can play again. Well, I can't stand this kind of
baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and
I'll have nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was in
when it was my turn to talk to the psychiatrist.
I sit down at the desk, and the psychiatrist starts looking through my
papers. "Hello, Dick!" he says in a cheerful voice. "Where do you
work?"
I'm thinking, "Who does he think he is, calling me by my first name?"
and I say coldly, "Schenectady."
"Who do you work for, Dick?" says the psychiatrist, smiling again.
"General Electric."
"Do you like your work, Dick?" he says, with that same big smile on his
face.
"So-so." I just wasn't going to have anything to do with him.
Three nice questions, and then the fourth one is completely different.
"Do you think people talk about you?" he asks, in a low, serious
tone.
I light up and say, "Sure! When I go home, my mother often tells me how
she was telling her friends about me." He isn't
listening to the explanation; instead, he's writing something
down on my paper.
Then again, in a low, serious tone, he says, "Do you think people stare
at you?"
I'm all ready to say no, when he says, ''For instance, do you think any
of the boys waiting on the benches are staring at you now?"
While I had been waiting to talk to the psychiatrist, I had noticed
there were about twelve guys on the benches waiting for
the three psychiatrists, and they've got nothing else to look
at, so I divide twelve by three -- that makes four each -- but
I'm conservative, so I say, "Yeah, maybe two of them are looking
at us."
He says, "Well just turn around and look" -- and he's not even
bothering to look himself!
So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. So I point to
them and I say, "Yeah -- there's that guy, and that guy
over there looking at us." Of course, when I'm turned
around and pointing like that, other guys start to look at us, so
I say, "Now him, and those two over there -- and now the whole
bunch." He still doesn't look up to check. He's busy writing more
things on my paper.
Then he says, "Do you ever hear voices in your head?"
"Very rarely," and I'm about to describe the two occasions on which it
happened when he says, "Do you talk to yourself?"
"Yeah, sometimes when I'm shaving, or thinking; once in a while." He's
writing down more stuff.
"I see you have a deceased wife -- do you talk to her?"
This question really annoyed me, but I contained myself and said,
"Sometimes, when I go up on a mountain and I'm thinking about
her."
More writing. Then he asks, "Is anyone in your family in a mental
institution?"
"Yeah, I have an aunt in an insane asylum."
"Why do you call it an insane asylum?" he says, resentfully. "Why don't
you call it a mental institution?"
"I thought it was the same thing."
"Just what do you think insanity is?" he says, angrily.
"It's a strange and peculiar disease in human beings," I say honestly.
"There's nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than
appendicitis!" he retorts.
"I don't think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and
something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it's
much more complicated and mysterious." I won't go through the
whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is
physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was
socially peculiar.
Up until this time, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist,
I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he
asked me to put out my hands, I couldn't resist pulling a
trick a guy in the "bloodsucking line" had told me about. I
figured nobody was ever going to get a chance to do this, and as
long as I was halfway under water, I would do it. So I put out my
hands with one palm up and the other one down.
The psychiatrist doesn't notice. He says, "Turn them over."
I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was
down goes up, and he still doesn't notice, because he's
always looking very closely at one hand to see if it is shaking.
So the trick had no effect.
Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again.
He lights up and says, "I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did
you study?"
"MIT and Princeton. And where did you study?"
"Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?"
"Physics. And what did you study?"
"Medicine."
"And this is medicine?"
"Well, yes. What do you think it is? You go and sit down over there and
wait a few minutes!"
So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles
up to me and says, "Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes!
The other guys were in there only five minutes!"
"Yeah."
"Hey," he says. "You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you
have to do is pick your nails, like this."
"Then why don't you pick your nails like that?"
"Oh," he says, "I wanna get in the army!"
"You wanna fool the psychiatrist?" I say. "You just tell him that!"
After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another
psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather
young and innocent-looking, this one was gray-haired and
distinguished-looking -- obviously the superior psychiatrist. I
figure all of this is now going to get straightened out, but no
matter what happens, I'm not going to become friendly.
The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face,
and says, "Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the
war."
"Yeah."
"There used to be a boys' school there, didn't there?"
"That's right."
"Were there a lot of buildings in the school?"
"Only a few."
Three questions -- same technique -- and the next question is
completely different. "You said you hear voices in your head.
Describe that, please."
"It happens very rarely, when I've been paying attention to a person
with a foreign accent. As I'm falling asleep I can hear his
voice very clearly. The first time it happened was while I was
a student at MIT. I could hear old Professor Vallarta say,
'Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.' And the other time was in
Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was explaining to
me how the bomb worked. Since I'm interested in all kinds of
phenomena, I wondered how I could hear these voices with
accents so precisely, when I couldn't imitate them that well...
Doesn't everybody have something like that happen once in a
while?"
The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through
his fingers a little smile (he wouldn't answer the question).
Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. "You said that you
talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?"
I got angry. I figure it's none of his damn business, and I say, "I
tell her I love her, if it's all right with you!"
After some more bitter exchanges he says, "Do you believe in the
supernormal?"
I say, "I don't know what the 'supernormal' is."
"What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don't know what the supernormal is?"
"That's right."
"It's what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in."
That's not much of a clue, but I knew it. "You mean the supernatural."
"You can call it that if you want."
"All right, I will."
"Do you believe in mental telepathy?"
"No. Do you?"
"Well, I'm keeping an open mind."
"What? You, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind? Ha!" It went on like
this for quite a while.
Then at some point near the end he says, "How much do you value life?"
"Sixty-four."
"Why did you say 'sixty-four'?"
"How are you supposed to measure the value of life?"
"No! I mean, why did you say 'sixty-four,' and not 'seventy-three,' for
instance?"
"If I had said 'seventy-three,' you would have asked me the same
question!"
The psychiatrist finished with three friendly questions, just as the
other psychiatrist had done, handed me my papers, and I went off
to the next booth.
While I'm waiting in the line, I look at the paper which has the
summary of all the tests I've taken so far. And just for the
hell of it I show my paper to the guy next to me, and I
ask him in a rather stupid-sounding voice, "Hey! What did you
get in 'Psychiatric'? Oh! You got an 'N.' I got an 'N' in
everything else, but I got a 'D' in 'Psychiatric.' What does
that mean?" I knew what it meant: "N" is normal, "D" is
deficient.
The guy pats me on the shoulder and says, "Buddy, it's perfectly all
right. It doesn't mean anything. Don't worry about it!" Then he
walks way over to the other corner of the room, frightened: It's a
lunatic!
I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it
looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote: Thinks people talk
about him.
Thinks people stare at him.
Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.
Talks to self.
Talks to deceased wife.
Maternal aunt in mental institution.
Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was -- that was when I said,
"And this is medicine?")
The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his
scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like "auditory
hypnogogic hallucinations confirmed." ("Hypnogogic" means you
get them while you're falling asleep.)
He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them
over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I'd have to get
all of this straightened out with the army somehow.
At the end of the whole physical examination there's an army officer
who decides whether you're in or you're out. For instance,
if there's something the matter with your hearing, he
has to decide if it's serious enough to keep you out of the
army. And because the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel
for new recruits, this officer wasn't going to take anything
from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow
ahead of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck
-- some kind of displaced vertebra, or something -- and this army
officer had to get up from his desk and feel them -- he had
to make sure they were real!
I figure this is the place I'll get this whole misunderstanding
straightened out. When it's my turn, I hand my papers to the
officer, and I'm ready to explain everything, but the officer
doesn't look up. He sees the "D" next to "Psychiatric,"
immediately reaches for the rejection stamp, doesn't ask me any
questions, doesn't say anything; he just stamps my papers
"REJECTED," and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.
So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was
riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had
happened, and I started to laugh -- out loud -- and I said to
myself, "My God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!"
When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Harts Bethe. He
was sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking
voice, "Well, Dick, did you pass?"
I made a long face and shook my head slowly. "No."
Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some
serious medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned
voice, "What's the matter, Dick?"
I touched my finger to my forehead.
He said, "No!"
"Yes!"
He cried, "No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!!" and he laughed so hard that the roof of
the General Electric Company nearly came off.
I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a
few exceptions.
When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for
me at the airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all
the story. At the end of it my mother said, "Well, what should we
do, Mel?"
My father said, "Don't be ridiculous, Lucille. It's absurd!"
So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and
they were alone, my father said, "Now, Lucille, you shouldn't
have said anything in front of him. Now what should we
do?"
By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, "Don't be
ridiculous, Mel!"
One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical
Society meeting dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at
MIT, said, "Hey, Feynman! Tell us that story about the draft I
heard."
I told the whole story to all these physicists -- I didn't know any of
them except Slater -- and they were all laughing throughout, but
at the end one guy said, "Well, maybe the psychiatrist had
something in mind."
I said resolutely, "And what profession are you, sir?" Of course, that
was a dumb question, because we were all physicists at a
professional meeting. But I was surprised that a physicist would
say something like that.
He said, "Well, uh, I'm really not supposed to be here, but I came as
the guest of my brother, who's a physicist. I'm a psychiatrist."
I smoked him right out!
After a while I began to worry. Here's a guy who's been deferred all
during the war because he's working on the bomb, and the draft
board gets letters saying he's important, and now he gets a "D"
in "Psychiatric" -- it turns out he's a nut! Obviously he
isn't a nut; he's just trying to make us believe
he's a nut -- we'll get him!
The situation didn't look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After
a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the
draft board that went something like this:
Dear Sirs:
I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science
students, and it is partly in the strength of our future
scientists that the national welfare lies. Nevertheless, you
may decide that I should be deferred because of the result of
my medical report, namely, that I am psychiatrically unfit. I
feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached to this report
because I consider it to be a gross error.
I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough
not to wish to take advantage of it.
Sincerely,
R. P. Feynman
Result: "Deferred. 4F. Medical Reasons."