William C. Menninger—(1899-1966)

My contribution to these reminiscences and reflections about Dr. Will will center—by assignment from Dr. Kenworthy—on one particular segment, which tends perhaps to be quietly overlooked in the face of his busy and multifaceted activities, but one which is at the core of his professional and scientific identity. I am referring to Dr. William Menninger as a psychoanalyst.

That Dr. Will, along with Dr. Karl, was identified with psychoanalytic theory and method, and that this served as the explanatory center for his multifarious psychiatric activities, is known to all who were attuned to his lifework. He came easily and early to psychoanalytic theory, in the early and mid-'30s, as part of the intellectual vanguard of American psychiatry which embraced the new holistic explanatory system with eagerness, hope, and enthusiasm, and which was to change the face of American psychiatry. Sensitive to the moods and the needs of his psychiatric patients, he saw the relevance and responded at once to the need for sensitive and intimate contact, to talking about and understanding love, inhibitions, and conflict, the myriad of conflicts which make up human suffering.

It was upon this as a base, harnessed to the extraordinary qualities which have come to be associated with the name Menninger (it will be hard in this presentation to separate two who share this name), that the most outstanding and distinguished mental hospital in this country, destined to spawn many others along the same lines, developed and grew at the geographic center of the United States. Indeed, the only thing more unlikely than the development of this most sophisticated, urbane, and enlightened mental institution in Topeka, Kansas, was the firm "take" of psychoanalytic theory at its central core. A product of early twentieth-century intellectual Vienna, it seeded and found a new home in rural Kansas. But from the two trunks from which it grew, and on the patients to whom its insights were applied, it seemed