Menninger: The Family and the Clinic by Lawrence J. Friedman New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1990,  xix + 472 pp., $29.95

The study of the history of psychiatry has been appallingly slack. Because medical schools are centrally concerned with the nuts-and-bolts issues of training future physicians, the history of medicine in general is apt to be neglected. Psychiatry poses special problems for sustaining the importance of the past because of the existence of rival schools of thought. Each of these factions, even when genuinely concerned with history, has been prone to ignore developments in neighboring quarters of thought. The result is, for example, that although the general public now knows a good deal about the story of Freud and his following, those figures not immediately associated with the creator of psychoanalysis have been left in scholarly limbo. Critics of early psychoanalytic thinking, even when their points are today silently acknowledged, go unremembered. Virtually no psychiatric literature exists about someone as important as Karl Jaspers, or even a member of Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society like Paul Schilder. And Adolf Meyer, arguably the most important person in the history of 20th-century North American psychiatry, has yet to attract anything close to the attention he deserves.

Lawrence J. Friedman's Menninger is an outstanding exception to the general state of neglect in this area. Friedman is a professional historian without any ideological axes to grind. He was given free access to the files at the Menninger Foundation, although legal restrictions kept most patients' records out of bounds; Friedman also interviewed many people who worked there.

Karl Menninger, known in his circle as Dr. Karl, died in July 1990. As an American, he was relatively ignored by Freud's European disciples; worse, despite the significance of his role in promoting psychoanalytic thinking within American psychiatry, Menninger's writings have too often been ignored in authors' reference