An Interview With Jack El-Hai on Psychology, History, and Human Motivation
Interview by David Webb
With the recent release of Nuremberg, adapted from his book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, Jack El-Hai’s work has found a renewed and wider audience. But long before the film, El-Hai was asking questions that sit squarely at the heart of psychology: how ordinary people commit extraordinary harm, how institutions shape behavior, and why the search for moral explanations so often clashes with uncomfortable evidence. In this interview, I explore how he approaches complex human stories at the intersection of history, medicine, and motivation, and why resisting simple answers is central to his work.
What first drew you to becoming a history and science writer?
I began writing history articles early in my career when I noticed that few writers were covering history well in the city magazines in my area, Minneapolis–St. Paul. I pitched some stories, found that I enjoyed the research (and occasional interviews), and started writing more.
Medical and science writing came to me years later, mainly as a result of writing one story: an account of the use of lobotomies to treat psychiatric illnesses in the Upper Midwest. The city magazines that published most of my work thought the topic was gross, so I published the story in the magazine of the Minnesota Medical Association.
I became interested in the topic after reading a letter to the editor in my local newspaper written by a woman whose uncle had undergone a lobotomy in 1968 in the Minnesota state hospital system. I contacted her and she told me his story. I found it compelling and began writing about lobotomy for national publications, and then my book The Lobotomist, a biography of lobotomy developer and advocate Walter Freeman, came out in 2005.
Through all that, I grew comfortable covering medicine and eventually science, even though I did not have an academic background in those fields.
What methods do you use to translate complex historical research into narratives that work for a general audience?
In my books, I try to limit my investigations to addressing two or three compelling questions. I may not be able to answer the questions in the end, but they enable me to limit the scope of my research and avoid burying readers in too much information that doesn’t pertain to my story.
My books are always about people, not places, things, movements, or beliefs, and I’ve learned that I do best when I write about pairs of people who conflict with each other. In The Nazi and the Psychiatrist I focused on German war criminal Hermann Göring and psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley; in The Lobotomist I covered Walter Freeman and his surgical partner James Watts.
Aside from my short opening chapters, I stick to chronologically told narratives.
“My books are always about people, not places, things, movements, or beliefs.”
You’ve spoken about how you’re drawn to stories built around central pairs, or what you’ve called “thinking in twos.” In The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the pairing is Hermann Göring and Dr. Douglas Kelley, whose conflict drives the psychological tension of the book. More recently, in The Face in the Mirror, the pairing is a surgeon and his patient, at the center of the first face transplant at the Mayo Clinic. Are there any other pairings you’d love to explore in future work?
My next nonfiction book, The Case of the Autographed Corpse: A Medicine Man and a Mystery Writer in Pursuit of Justice (Pegasus, fall 2026) pairs Apache medicine man Silas John Edwards with best-selling writer Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason mysteries.
Edwards was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona in 1933, and after serving twenty years of a life sentence he interested Gardner, through his organization the Court of Last Resort, in investigating his case. Edwards and Gardner, working together, brought about Edwards’s eventual release from prison.
My nonfiction book coming after that, still in the sketchy stages, might involve a similar pairing of an ex-convict and a writer.
“Edwards and Gardner, working together, brought about Edwards’s eventual release from prison.”
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was adapted into the film Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as Dr. Douglas M. Kelley. How accurate did you feel their portrayals were?
The movie is mostly factual. Crowe’s portrayal of Göring is quite close to fact; Malek applied his interpretive talents to create a version of Kelley that is less close to history but serves the movie better than a strictly factual portrayal would have.
Good movies and good books are very different creations with different purposes. Movies that try to teach history are usually dull and lacking in focus. The best movies entertain and move us. Books can do that, too, but nonfiction authors are bound to stick to fact.
One of the many fascinating threads in The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is Dr. Kelley’s decision to go beyond his official brief. While his formal role was to determine whether the defendants at Nuremberg were mentally fit to stand trial, he also pursued a personal project: assessing whether Göring and the other members of the Nazi high command shared a common psychiatric disorder or distinguishing psychological trait that could account for their crimes against humanity.
Why do you think Dr. Kelley’s conclusion that the defendants were psychologically ordinary, and that people like them exist in every country, was so firmly rejected by both the public and much of the psychiatric community?
A long and horribly bloody war had finally ended. Everyone wanted to believe that the conclusion of World War II meant an end to fascism, genocide, and crimes against peace and humanity because the monster-villains had been defeated.
Kelley’s position ran against this tide: he maintained that the Nazi leaders were not monsters or mad. Instead, they fell within the normal range of personality. Not only were the Nazi leaders not uniquely evil, they represented an always-present segment of humanity, opportunists willing to harm half of humanity to control the other half.
Kelley thought this type of person existed in every country, in every era, in most realms of human endeavor. When he returned to the States from Nuremberg in 1946, he recognized them among the segregationist politicians of the South.
The only way for America to avoid a fascist future was to make it easier for qualified voters to cast ballots, improve the educational system to emphasize critical thinking, and campaign against political candidates who tried to draw emotional responses from voters and who made political capital of the otherness of people from different races, nations, and faiths.
America was not ready for this message, and Kelley’s book 22 Cells in Nuremberg (1947) flopped.
“They represented an always-present segment of humanity, opportunists willing to harm half of humanity to control the other half.”
A distinctive feature of your work is your refusal to write “take-down” biographies, even when dealing with deeply troubling figures. How difficult is it to maintain a neutral, non-judgmental stance when you’re immersed in material involving such profound harm?
My approach is not exactly neutral or non-judgmental because from the great mass of information I could include in my books, I select what goes in to best serve the story. They are guided and curated tours, not data dumps.
As a reader, however, I dislike books with a prescriptive and overly directive narrative. I don’t want to be told what to think, and I prefer to let my readers come to their own conclusions.
Some readers amaze me with the conclusions they reach.
Has there ever been a particular moment, while researching one of your books, that changed how you think about human nature?
It’s happened, but I’m not apt to speculate on human nature in general. Instead, my research has sometimes led me to wonder about the figures I’m writing about.
While researching The Lobotomist, for example, I came across a photo album Walter Freeman had kept when he worked in the pathology lab at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., long before he began performing lobotomies.
He took dozens of photos showing the naked corpses of dead patients as he scrutinized every measurable part of their bodies in an attempt to discover the physical attributes of patients who died. The bodies were often wasted and diseased, some hanging from the ceiling, and Freeman clearly had lost sight of the patients’ humanity.
I had to take a few walks around the block as I considered what kind of physician would assemble such a disturbing album. I’m most interested in motivation, and Freeman’s motivations had me spinning.
“Freeman clearly had lost sight of the patients’ humanity.”
For readers who may be unfamiliar with The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, who was Walter Freeman, M.D., and why did you feel his story needed to be told?
I believed that I had to tell Freeman’s story in The Lobotomist to pursue the answers to two questions that intrigued me: what accounted for Freeman’s attraction to brain surgery as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses at a time when so few psychiatrists believed in the biological origins of mental illness, and why Freeman stuck with lobotomy for so long, all the way to his death in 1972, many years after even his colleagues most devoted to the procedure had abandoned it.
I was personally interested in this man’s motivations, although I was not sure if anyone else would be.
You often highlight how cultural, institutional, and historical forces shape individual behavior. Do you think psychology underestimates the power of context when explaining why people do what they do?
I am not certain that psychology does underestimate the influence of context. What I do know is that historical context explains an awful lot of wrongdoing, bad decision-making, and unwarranted certainty.
That has been the case in all of my books.
Looking across your career, are there recurring psychological themes you find yourself returning to, even when the subject matter changes?
A long time ago, when I was giving a talk about The Lobotomist, a woman in the audience rose to ask me why I wrote the book. I began giving an answer about the importance of the topic, the lack of any previous biography of Freeman, and so on, but the woman interrupted me.
“No, I don’t want to hear about that,” she said. “What I’m asking is why did you have to be the person to write this book?” I did not have an answer, but I realized she was on to something important.
If I could figure out what drew me, personally, to certain kinds of stories, I might be able to find more of those stories and tap into what resonated deep within me. I have tried to do that with each book I’ve written after The Lobotomist.
As you can imagine, the answers are personal and emotional, so I won’t detail them here. But they have helped me in my writing to delve more substantially into my topics.
Finally, for readers who’d like to explore your work further, where’s the best place to find out more about your books and current projects?
The best place is my website, el-hai.com. I also post regularly on Bluesky, X, Instagram, and Threads, and readers can find me there.
About Jack El-Hai
Jack El-Hai is a writer of nonfiction books, articles, and essays about medicine, science, history, and crime. During 2025–2026, he has given many media interviews and presentations on the work of Douglas M. Kelley, M.D., a U.S. Army psychiatrist who studied the twenty-two German defendants during the 1945–1946 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg – all occasioned by the recent release of the film Nuremberg, adapted from El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and screened worldwide.
Among his other books are The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, a biography of lobotomy developer and promoter Walter Freeman, M.D.; Face in the Mirror, which follows a patient’s road to and recovery from a face transplant; and The Lost Brothers, about a family’s 74-year-long search for three missing boys. His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The Atlantic, GQ, The Washington Post, Wired, Scientific American, and other publications.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Lancet, JAMA, major newspapers in the U.K., dozens of podcasts, and many other media outlets in North America, Europe, and Latin America have interviewed El-Hai and covered his work.
He has given lectures and presentations at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, the Nathan Klein Psychiatric Institute, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Mississippi, the Library of Virginia, Stanford University, and in the medical schools of the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, Tufts University, the University of Maryland, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and the Mayo Clinic. He has also addressed the annual conferences of the American Psychological Association, the History of Science Society, the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and the American Society of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery.
Born in Los Angeles, El-Hai earned his Bachelor’s degree at Carleton College and his Master’s of Fine Arts degree (in nonfiction writing) at Bennington College. He is a past president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and a past board chair of the Loft Literary Center. He lives in Minneapolis.
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