1936

British psychiatrist Stephen Horsley announces development of narco-analysis “by announcing that sodium amytal provided a means of carrying out ‘exploratory surgery’ on the mind.” During the trance state, “repressed traumatic memories could be retrieved and examined and then the application of posthypnotic suggestion could integrate this mental content into the patient’s mind; hence narco-analysis as “the poor man’s psychoanalysis” (Winter, 381-83). In WW II, this approach and explanatory carried over by Roy Grinker and John Spiegel in their narcosynthesis, which gave rise to the U.S. Army Signal Corp’s 1943 film Combat Exhaustion” (Winter, 385ff.).