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Karl A. Menninger played so important a role in the history of 20th-century American psychiatry that he seems almost an institution rather than a man. In 1920 he founded, with his father, the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. They had a sanitarium by 1925, and a school for disturbed children was opened the next year. For years now, the Menninger Clinic has been a central training facility for young psychiatrists as well as for
those with primarily research interests. Dr. Karl's first book, The Human Mind , was a best seller that sold some 200,000 hardcover copies; he published a number of other notable texts, contributed countless columns for magazine readers, and generally became identified in the public mind with the progressive effort to use psychiatric knowledge for humanitarian purposes.
I will in this review be examining Menninger's specific contribution to psychoanalysis as illustrated in this selection of his correspondence. It is worth noting at the outset that by and large the distinctively American analysts have been relatively little written about, compared with those European figures who had training contact either with Freud or with his immediate disciples abroad. Evidently Menninger early on felt resentful of the kind of reception the European emigré analysts were getting in the States. As he wrote in 1943, “some of them came over with a very authoritative, eloquent attitude as if they were about to instruct the benighted American savages in the highlights of European science” (p. 391). I could not help being amused by a passage from a 1936 letter of Menninger's about Helene Deutsch, who had only recently arrived then in America:
As for Helene Deutsch, I personally wish you would cancel the [speaking] invitation. It makes me so damn mad at these foreigners who act as if they were privileged characters who didn't need to answer letters and telegrams, etc. As far as I'm concerned, I don't want to hear Helene Deutsch and I'm telling you right now I won't come