Preface

I owe the inspiration for this issue of American Imago to Howard Faulkner and Virginia Pruitt, who submitted their manuscript, “The Unpublished Menninger,” in March 2006. Despite its length, it was clear to me that this monograph recounting their experiences as the editors of Karl Menninger's correspondence, and detailing the material that they had been obliged to omit from their two published volumes, was eminently worth accepting. With the paper by Faulkner and Pruitt as my centerpiece, I then sought to burnish the issue by soliciting contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts who were associated with the Menninger School of Psychiatry in its heyday, and who could thus supplement the scholarly narrative of Faulkner and Pruitt from their unique first-hand vantage points.

Emboldened by his previous acts of kindness, I began by contacting Robert Wallerstein, who offered to furnish a “personal perspective” on Karl Menninger the man. Next, at the Winter Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I sought out Howard Shevrin, who consented to address the research component of the Menninger enterprise. Finally, in May, at a lecture by Eric Kandel at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, I serendipitously encountered Herbert Schlesinger, who yielded to my entreaties and found the time to complete his paper, “The Treatment Program at Menninger,” by my altogether unrealistic deadline. Having drawn three kings to go with my aces in the hole, I am now confident that this full house will supply the wherewithal for anyone who wants to travel back to the bright, shining moment when Topeka, Kansas, became the Camelot of American psychoanalysis.

Although Faulkner and Pruitt come in, as it were, near the end of the story—in the mid-1980s, when Karl Menninger was already over ninety—they, too, had personal contact with the great man. In psychoanalytic fashion, their attempt to secure Menninger's cooperation in preparing their edition of