Here is Richard Feynman's tale of evaluation for military service, which he underwent in Albany, New York, USA, soon after World War II:
All right, I’ll tell you the story, in its detail, and you can just throw it out if it’s too — all right? OK. Well, this was after the war was over. They were still looking for people for the draft because of the Occupation forces and so on in Germany, and they changed some rule or something, that you had to take an examination even if maybe you would be deferred for occupational reasons or something like that. So I went to take an examination in Albany. I was working in GE at the time. In these exams you go from one booth to another. I don’t know, you may know how these exams — look, you’re in your BVDs. The doctors are all dressed nicely, and you go from one booth to the other. They suck blood in one booth and they do something else in another booth, and so on. Finally we get to Booth No. 13, Psychiatrist. In order to understand what happened, you have to understand my attitude to psychiatrists at the time. I thought they were kind of like witch doctors and that they were a lot of baloney and further, that they ask a lot of personal questions that were nobody’s business. On such an examination it’s nobody’s business — you know, I don’t have to answer — and they’re kind of fakers, and so on. Furthermore, I had just seen two moving pictures which had to do with psychiatrists that had made me very angry, you see. There was one of them, I think called “Spellbound” or something, in which a woman’s hand is stuck and she can’t play the piano. I think that was the story, or maybe it was the other one. She can’t play the piano. She used to be a great pianist, but her hands are frozen. She can’t touch the piano — it goes on through the whole movie. It’s boring as hell, and at the end of the plot, she goes upstairs with the psychiatrist into a room and they close the door. You don’t know what happens in there. Then, her family’s talking downstairs, and finally she comes out, comes down the stairs dramatically — hands still stuck, hands still stuck, you know? She sits finally at the piano, lifts these hands up — still stuck — and it’s very dramatic. Everybody’s quiet. What’s going to happen? She puts them down on the piano, and of course — latatatalatada! Everything’s fine! Well, this kind of baloney, you know, I can’t stand it. So I’m very anti. Ok? That’s necessary to understand. Well, the Psychiatry Booth 13, had four psychiatrists behind four desks, set parallel to each other, one next to the other, with the psychiatrist behind the desk and a chair at the side of the desk for one to sit in, in his BVDs. In spite of the fact that they had four of them, there was a sort of a backlog, so they had benches in front for the waiters to wait. So we waited. While we were waiting, I look at these fellows, and I see more or less what’s happening. A guy will sit down, and he has these papers with him on which everything is written — all this information, his name, address, and so on, on the front, plus all the other junk that the doctors have found out. And he hands it to the psychiatrist, and the guy looks up at him with a very pleasant nice little smile and a happy look, and then the fellow answers some pleasantry with another pleasantry, and they go back and forth a few minutes this way. That’s all. Well, I decided, I don’t care about these guys. I ain’t getting friendly with them. I just don’t’ want to be friendly. It’s none of their business. I’m not going to be friendly, that’s all. I mean, I just don’t like it. So that was the attitude, see. So it’s my turn. I get up there, sit down, and the fellow looks through my papers, and he turns to me and he says, “Hello, Dick! Where do you work?” Well, what the hell is he calling me “Dick” for? You know, he don’t know me that well. You understand what I mean? So I just said to him, “Schenectady” — in a tone, in a sense, “what’s it to you?” You know? So he says, “Where do you work at Schenectady, Dick?” I say, “GE.” “You like your work, Dick?” I say, “So, so.” You know, not a smile. I mean, I couldn’t like him less, you know. Like a guy bothering you in a bar when you don’t want him to. You’re trying to shut him up. So the fourth question is a complete change, complete transformation. The attitude — the smile disappears — it’s like a formula, you know. He says to me, “Do you think people talk about you?” So I say, “Yeah,” and I tried to explain. I wasn’t trying to fake it. I said, “Yes.” I meant in the sense that my mother talks to her friends, because sometimes I meet the friends and they say, “Your mother told me that you were doing very well,” and so and so, and I tried to explain -– honest — you know? Then he writes something down. Then he says, “Do you think people stare at you?” And I’m all ready to answer “No” when he says, “For example, do you think that any of the fellows sitting at the benches are looking at us now?” So I figure, this fourth thing — there are about 12 guys in the thing and about 3 of them are looking. Well, that’s all they’ve got to do. So I say, to be conservative, “Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us.” He says, “Well, just turn around and look.” So I turn around, and sure enough, two guys are looking. I say, “Yeah, him and him.” But by having turned around and pointing, it was a little different from the other fellows, and other guys start to look. I say, “Now a couple of other fellows are looking. Now the whole bunch of them is looking at me.” And this nincompoop — this smart, sprain of a nut, doesn’t bother to turn around and find out if it’s true or not. He simply writes something else down. He doesn’t even look to see if it’s the fact of the matter. So then he asks me if I talk to myself, and I admitted that I do. I don’t know if it’s characteristic of theoretical physicists — I doubt — but I do talk to myself when looking in the mirror and thinking, see. Incidentally, I didn’t tell him something which I can tell you, which is I find myself sometimes talking to myself in quite an elaborate fashion. It goes something like this: “The integral will be larger than this sum of the terms, so that would make the pressure higher, you see? No, you’re crazy. No, I’m not, no, I’m not!” I say. I argue with myself -– “You’re crazy. No I’m not.” And so on. I have two voices that work back and forth. Anyhow, aside from that, he writes that down, and then he says, “I see you lost a wife recently. Do you talk to her?” I said, “Yeah, when I’m on a mountain all alone, sometimes I talk to her.” “And what do you say to her?” I said, “I tell her I love her, if it’s all right with you.” So then he asked me other questions. He says, “Do you ever hear voices in your head?” I say, “No, very rarely.” He says, “What do you mean, very rarely?” I said, “Well — rarely. Two or three times in my life.” He said, “What do you hear?” I said, “Well, I have a situation —” I was very interested in it, and I told him a little bit. I said, “If I hear somebody talk in an accent very hard for a long time, when I’m falling asleep I hear that accent even when I can’t reproduce it. So I pay attention because it’s a peculiar phenomenon.” It happened, incidentally, when I went to Chicago to find out how the atomic bomb worked for the people at Princeton. And for two days Teller was explaining to me about the atomic bomb in his Hungarian accent. Well, as I’d fall asleep, of course, I’d hear the Hungarian accent perfect. So that was an example that I had in mind. So he writes something else. Then he asks me if anybody in the family had any difficulties, mental difficulties or something. I say, “Yes, my mother’s sister is in an insane asylum.” He says, “Why do you call it an insane asylum? Why don’t you call it a mental institution?” I said, “Because I thought they were the same thing.” He said, “Just what do you think insanity is?” I said, “I thought it was a strange and peculiar disease of human beings.” “It’s no more strange,” says he, “than appendicitis.” So then we got off on an argument that with appendicitis, the details of the causes at least can be more or less elucidated, whereas the other thing is —. It turned out our argument was on this: that I meant by “peculiar” an interesting natural phenomenon, not well understood; that what he meant by “peculiar” was, it shouldn’t be considered socially odd or unacceptable. And that was where we were arguing for a while, until I realized what the debate was about — that he meant it was like appendicitis; a person is just sick. Ok. So this went on for a while. Then he said to me, “How much do you value life?” I said, “64.” He said, “Why do you say 64?” I said, “I thought it was a kind of a dumb question, and I tried to think, I don’t know any way to measure how much I value life, so I kind of imagined that I was giving an answer.” “No,” he says, “but why 64?” I said, “I just explained to you. It was just an arbitrary number.” “No, why didn’t you say 73?” I said, “If I said 73 you’d ask me the same thing. You’d ask me the same question. It’s hopeless.” I couldn’t get out from under that. He asked me lots of questions about that answer. He bothered me about that answer because I couldn’t explain it to him, because he couldn’t imagine that I should imagine that the question was stupid. That was too hard for him. And why should I think the question was stupid? And so on. And we had a long tussle with that one. It was a bad answer. It didn’t work. Then, I don’t remember all the questions, but I’ll give you some more, if you like. Is this all right?
It’s interesting to me personally.
Then he went through the business of hitting you on the knee, you know, and the jerk, and the eye, and the pupil goes down, and so on. And then he asked me to put out my hands. And this was the first time that I really did something purposely to make trouble, because in the blood sucking line, in some earlier booth, some guy had — just for a joke, kids were talking, guys were talking — said, “Do you know what to do when the psychiatrist tells you to put out your hands?” And he showed us a trick that was so damn funny it was wonderful. When he asked me to put out my hands, I knew I was so far under water by this time that it was hopeless, and this was the only opportunity that a human being would really have to do this to a psychiatrist, see. So when he asked me to put out my hands, I put out my hands — with one palm up and the other one down. You see? So he says, “Turn them over.” So I turned them over, both of them over, so still one palm was down and the other up. This part nobody believes when I tell them. It’s hard for people to believe when I tell them — but he did not notice that. No. Because he was looking very closely at one hand, to see if the fingers shook or something like that. As far as I can make out, he was peering very hard at one hand, I guess looking for sweat in the palm or something, you see. And he told me to turn it over. I turned it over, but he didn’t notice that the other hand was the opposite of that one. So that didn’t go over so good. Then it went on like this, and I don’t remember more questions except, at the end of the interview, there was a sudden shift again, and he looks at the papers. “Well, Dick,” he says, “I see you have a PhD. Where did you study?” I said, “MIT and Princeton. Where did you study?” He said, “Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?” I said, “Physics. And what did you study?” He said, “Medicine.” I said, “And this is medicine?” He said, “Yeah, what do you think it is? You go over there and sit down!” So I went over and I sat down on the bench. He took his papers over to another, to the next psychiatrist, see. Another man, older, more sensible and so on. This fellow had a culprit there he was talking to. So he nodded, one minute, and it was obvious I had to wait for this other guy. So sure enough, when the first fellow was done, I was called over and the second man starts in. He went through exactly the same pattern. He started out, “Hello, Dick. I see you were at Los Alamos. There used to be a boys’ school there, wasn’t there?” “Yeah.” “Well, Dick, were there any of the old buildings from the school there?” “Well, there were some buildings from the school, but the government built a lot of stuff too.” Then something “Dick” again, third question, I can’t remember, but that was the pattern. Fourth question — change of voice, same idea, see — exactly the same pattern — and the fourth question was something I can’t remember, but among the questions later was the question, “Do you believe in the supernormal?” So I said I don’t know what the supernormal is. He said, “What, you, a PhD in physics, don’t know what the supernormal is?” “That’s right.” “It’s the stuff Sir Oliver Lodge and those people believe in!” I said, “Oh you mean the supernatural?” He said, “You can call it that if you will.” I said, “All right, I will, but I don’t believe in it.” He said, “Do you believe in mental telepathy?” I said, “No, do you?” He said, “I’m keeping an open mind.” So I said, “What, you, a psychiatrist, keeping an open mind?” I had fun with him. Then he asked me details about the voices that I hear as I fall asleep, and I try to give in much more detail that it was very, very rare, and that because I’m scientifically inclined, I noticed it. And I went through all this stuff, and that it was only when the accent was very strong and for a long period of time. And I said, “Doesn’t everybody have something like that once in a while?” And he put his fingers over his mouth, you see, and you could see the smile through the holes between his fingers, this superior smile. These guys just get — they’re so damn — what do you call it? Pat. I mean, they’re so convinced of themselves. They don’t have to consider the possibility that they could be wrong.
Smug.
Smug, yeah exactly. I’ll tell you what that was about, so you’ll understand those questions. The other fellow had written that I talked to my deceased wife, so he was trying to find out whether I believed in the supernatural. I mean, this is my interpretation of it. Or in mental telepathy, because if I believed in those two things, it wasn’t insane to talk to my deceased wife. If I don’t believe in them, I’m really a nut. See? Anyway, this fellow starts in, and I couldn’t help but tease him at the end. I loved to tease him, because he said to me — one of the questions was, “Do you consider yourself different or peculiar in any way? Different from other people?” I said — and I had to tease him, because I just couldn’t stand it — so I said, “Oh, I don’t consider myself different from anybody —” just opened another hole, you know. “Well,” he said, “in any way do you consider yourself, somehow or other that you don’t behave like others,” and so on. “Well, I wouldn’t —” and so on, he dragging it out of me and me holding it back. Finally I said, “Well, yes, when I go to parties, I get wild like I’m drunk, and have a very good time, as if I have a lot of — when I don’t drink very much.” So he says, “Does anybody ever tease you about this?” I said, “Well, I wouldn’t say they tease me,” and so on. You know, this same thing, this kind of a game—I drew it out a long time, you know, and finally admitted that they call me “Two Beer Feynman,” because it only takes me two beers to get drunk. So he wrote something else down. And then he gave me the papers. Then I went off to the next booth, where you jump up and down to see if your ankle bones are OK or something. I had fun. I had a lot of side things. I looked at the list, though. On the front it had “D”, for psychiatric, and “N” for everything else. “D” was deficient, “N” is normal. I looked on the inside to see what this fellow wrote, and if I’d seen it written and not known the situation, I would have believed it myself. It starts out: “Thinks people talk about him. Thinks people stare at him. Talks to self. Talks to deceased wife, died June, 1946. Hypnogogic hallucinations.” That means generated by sleep, I presume. Something like “peculiar stare.” I think it was probably when I said, “And this is medicine?” I don’t know. The other fellow I couldn’t read — oh, “Maternal sister in mental institution,” you know. It looked good. When written in a technical jargon, it sounds so much more powerful you know, than “my mother’s sister is in an insane asylum” — “maternal sister in…” So then the other fellow writes, and he must have been more important, because I couldn’t read his writing so well — it was scrawled, not listed so neatly, and I couldn’t read it all. Probably something he said like “gets drunk on two beers,” but one thing it did say — “auditory hypnotic hallucinations confirmed,” or “auditory hypnogogic hallucinations confirmed.”
You hear voices.
That’s what it means, auditory — hypnogogic, at the time you’re going to sleep — hallucinations, voices that aren’t there. He confirmed it. Well, ok. Well, anyway, any guy with that disease confirmed is really in trouble. But I still thought that these guys are kind of, you know — I mean, nobody believes in this crazy joke, and good practical men don’t pay much attention to it. And at the end of the thing, there was a good practical man. There was a military officer who was hard as nails, and was trying to drag the bottom of the barrel, because they just needed them for occupation forces and it wasn’t so important any more. He’s the guy who decides that you’re not in or you are in. The ear doctor says, he can’t hear out of one ear, and this guy decides, therefore, he shouldn’t be in the Army, or it’s not enough to make it serious. So he was the final arbiter. And he was very careful. He talked a long time to everybody. They guy ahead of me had bumps in the back of his neck. Something’s the matter with his bones sticking out. The fellow doesn’t believe it. He’s got to feel the bones, ask lots of questions, make sure how serious is this thing, you know. So I figured, ok, with him I’ll explain, I just didn’t want to get friendly, and this is what happened. So I hand the stuff to him. He opens up the paper. He puts his head down to read it. He doesn’t look up. As he reads it, he puts his hand out for the rejection stamp without looking up at all, stamps the thing “Rejected,” and hands me the paper still looking straight down, and does not say a word. That’s all. Not a question, nothing. People are afraid of that, you know.
He didn’t look at you?
Didn’t look at me, didn’t talk to me, didn’t ask anything, didn’t say a word, and didn’t try to find out if maybe it’s wrong. Like if the doctor says, “This guy’s got bumps sticking out,” you do something. But he says, “He’s a little bit nuts,” you’re afraid to ask questions. Very amusing. The only thing that bothered me after that was that during the war, my draft board was getting letters saying that this guy’s important. He’s doing research in physics; we need him, we need him, we need him. Now they’re getting letters saying, he’s teaching scientists at the university. It’s important. He’s teaching these scientists. This is very valuable, and so on. Now all of a sudden they get a thing: he’s off his rocker. One natural conclusion might be that he tried to fool the draft board because he got scared. You know? So I was worried that I would get into some kind of difficulty. At least, I was worried about it. So I wrote my draft board a letter which ran more or less as follows: “Local Board No. 1: Dear Sirs: I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching future scientists, and it is partly on the strength of her future scientists that the national welfare lies. If you do not consider this sufficient reason to defer me, you may still wish to defer me because of my medical examination, in which I was found to be psychiatrically unfit. I do not believe that any weight whatsoever should be attached to this examination as 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.” Actually, it wasn’t quite that beautifully done. That’s the outline. I also included in the letter an explanation of why I thought they made an error or how they made an error. Just so it wasn’t just that clever. But that was my original intention, just to write that. But then I thought, to be honest I should write a P.S. explaining why I thought it was in error.
You thought you needed to set the record straight.
Yeah, I did. I told them why I thought it must be an error. But their response to that was to send me a card marked “4F.” No questions asked. So that’s what happened. So that’s how it looks to society when the scientist meets with society. And they’re always talking nowadays of wanting to show that — you know I’m human like anybody else. If I were human like anybody else I would have passed the medical examination!
Throw that in their faces.
Yeah.