184 COHEN
Floyd Daft (director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic
Diseases), and James Shannon (then scientific director of the National
Heart Institute^2 ). There was no flexibility with respect to the opening
date; Congress had been promised that research would begin in March.
After serving five years in the Navy and completing my own psy
choanalysis–which had started before the war–I was serving as clinical
director of Chestnut Lodge, a small psychoanalytic hospital in Rockville,
Maryland. There were 15 physicians on the staff, several of whom I had
recruited. Felix, then president of the American Psychiatric Association,
was a friend of the director of the Lodge, Dexter M. Bullard, and
occasionally visited our staff conferences, sometimes accompanied by
members of his staff. For over six years I had been a consultant at the
National Naval Medical Center and I had also been a member of the
Panel on Human Relations and Morale of the Research and Development
Board of the Department of Defense.
Felix agreed with me that ideally it would be preferable for the program
to grow more slowly, to have time to find several senior staff, and to develop
with them the program that would be instituted. But he was certain that
we would have complete freedom and full understanding from experi
enced administrators. I knew one former and several current members of
the NIMH staff. Lawrence Coleman Kolb and I had taken Adolf Meyer’s
brain modeling class at the Johns Hopkins University in 1937, and we
had worked together for over a year at the Norfolk Naval Hospital. We
shared an office during a brief venture in part-time, private practice, and
were both members of Francis Braceland’s^3 examining team on the Ameri
can Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.^4 Kolb had joined the NIMH
staff immediately after release from active duty and had taken part in all
of the early planning for the new institute. He had been the secretary
for the meeting of the first National Mental Health Advisory Council.^5
John Eberhart, a social psychologist, had come as Kolb’s associate in- I had met Eberhart when he was serving as director of the extra
mural research program of the NIMH. He made a searching site visit
to Chestnut Lodge when Alfred Stanton and Morris Schwartz applied
for support for a sociological study of a mental hospital ward. They
received the 51st grant awarded by the institute.^6