cover image The Selected Correspondence of Karl A. Menninger: 1919-1945

The Selected Correspondence of Karl A. Menninger: 1919-1945

Karl A. Menninger, Howard J. Faulkner, Virginia D. Pruitt. Yale University Press, $75 (456pp) ISBN 978-0-300-03978-8

In the 27 years covered by this correspondence, Menninger progressed from being a young doctor in hometown practice to a veritable one-man institution of American psychiatryfounder of the Menninger Clinic, Americanizer of Freud, author of bestsellers like Man Against Himself . These letters are combative, resilient, outspoken, witty, articulate. His correspondents include Sigmund Freud, Franz Alexander, Norman Cousins, H. L. Mencken, Joseph Wood Krutch, David Selznick. Menninger's acrimonious attacks on Karen Horney, whom he accused of disloyalty to Freud, are below the level of dialogue he sustains throughout the rest of the volume. We learn almost nothing here about his divorce in 1941 and remarriage the same year, or about his own analysis with a disciple of Freud. Despite their personal guardedness, the letters chart the journey of a thinker who broke with orthodox Freudianism and came to view mental illness as a maladaptive response to one's interpersonal and social environment. Faulkner and Pruitt both teach at Washburn University in Kansas. (Jan.)