The Kansas Moralist

Karl Augustus Menninger, M.D., celebrated his 80th birthday at a monstrous bash last week. Like many another octogenarian, he spent much of the next day rocking in his chair. But this was no porch rocker; it was the spring-backed executive chair in the busy Chicago branch office of the Menninger Foundation, an umbrella organization for a multitude of psychiatric services. By 11 a.m. Menninger had already conferred with a number of people, including a publisher who is bringing out one of his three books for 1973. Besides a technical work, Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique (Basic Books; $7.95), rewritten with Dr. Philip Holzman, and an anthology of Dr. Menninger's writings called Sparks (Thomas Y. Crowell Co.; $7.95), edited by Freelance Writer Lucy Freeman, there is a provocative new work, Whatever Became of Sin?, which Hawthorn Books will bring out in October.

To his critics, Karl Menninger stands accused, with his late brother Will as accessory, of having put U.S. psychiatry into a too rigid Freudian framework. To his admirers, Dr. Karl has done more than any other man to strike the shackles of puritanism from the American mind. Says Harvard Research Psychiatrist Robert Coles, whose mother read Menninger's The Human Mind to him as a child: "Karl Menninger has an earthy sense of what is happening to people. In his work there is an encounter between American intuitive psychological wisdom and the European spirit of psychoanalysis, which he made part of the training of a whole generation of psychiatrists." Adds Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson: "In his books [Man Against Himself, Love Against Hate, The Vital Balance], Menninger translates Freud into American literature. He has not been a popularizer in the cheap sense, but rather an enlightener."

Family Clinic. Born in Topeka, the enlightener was the son of deeply religious parents. His father, Dr. Charles F. Menninger (1862-1953), had an innovative streak among his conservative fibers. After a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., he decided to set up a Menninger Diagnostic Clinic. His eldest son Karl, recently graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School, joined him as a specialist in neurology and psychiatry. Later Karl's younger brother, William, joined the clinic. The most tactful member of the family, "Dr. Will" (who died in 1966) fought valiantly for reforms in mental hospitals.

At first the local citizenry were determined not to have a "maniac ward" in town, but the Menningers persuaded them to withdraw their opposition and even to underwrite a psychiatric hospital. From this nucleus has grown the present Menninger Clinic, by far the most famous psychiatric hospital in the U.S., which pioneered in research, and was one of the first to set up a juvenile division (the Southard School). It conducts an outpatient service and seminars for businessmen and industrialists as well. Also in Topeka is the Menninger School of Psychiatry, which has trained more mind doctors than any other. As chief of staff, Dr. Karl directed all of these activities for four decades.

When he had turned 71 and still was not ready to relinquish command, impatient subordinates staged a palace revolution and kicked him upstairs to be chairman of the board. Some insiders hold that he did much, as an unpredictable autocrat, to bring this upon himself. One friend goes so far as to say: "He's a living example of his own thesis--Man Against Himself!"

Nowadays Dr. Karl and his second wife Jeanetta, who retired in 1970 as the editor of the Menninger Clinic's Bulletin, spend about one-third of the year in Chicago and one-third in Topeka. The rest of the time Karl is traveling, as lecturer, teacher and consultant. In Topeka he devotes most of his energy to The Villages, which he set up as a pilot plant for one of his most deeply felt concerns: preventive psychiatry. Each cottage in The Villages houses homeless children. Most are court wards, and on the usual foster home and institution circuit would probably become delinquent or criminal.

Menninger told TIME'S Gilbert Cant last week: "Their only crime is that they exist. In The Villages they live with no guards or attendants. Remember, they are there not for treatment or correction, and most certainly not for punishment, but just to be in a family set ting with 'parents' and big brothers or sisters. They learn what it is to be loved and to love, and to cooperate instead of only to hate and fight and steal.

"I've spent most of my life treating people and teaching young doctors to do so. But more and more I see the still greater importance of doing something preventive. Psychiatrists should eventually work themselves out of business by preventing illness or disorganization. But there's no money in prevention!"

Dr. Karl concedes that one-to-one therapy is needed for some patients. But in his own protean activities, he prefers projects in which he can affect thousands of people at a time rather than one. He and his brother Will preached prison reform for years before Karl wrote, in 1968, his powerful book The Crime of Punishment with its jolting thesis: "I suspect that all the crimes committed by all the jailed criminals do not equal in total social damage that of the crimes committed against them." Since he began to flog the penologists, there has been improvement in many prison systems, but he advocates educational programs to achieve social and vocational rehabilitation.

A Presbyterian elder (like his father), Karl Menninger grew up in an era when the word "sin" was commonly used to describe transgressions against the moral as well as the criminal code. Recently, he was struck by the disappearance of the word from modern man's vocabulary, except for formal prayers. "Why?" he rasps. "Doesn't anyone sin any more? Or doesn't anyone believe in sin? Or is nothing now a sin?" Hence his forthcoming book, Whatever Became of Sin?

Solitary Vice. Menninger finds the most dramatic change of this kind in society's attitudes toward masturbation. For thousands of years, he notes, masturbation was denounced by moralists in most societies. During the 19th century, even supposedly scientific men of medicine blamed "the solitary vice of self-abuse" for all manner of ills, from acne and anemia to cancer and of course insanity. Then the moral as well as the medical climate began to change. After Havelock Ellis and Freud, says Dr. Karl, the ancient "sin of youth" seemed not to be so sinful, perhaps not sinful at all, less of a vice than a pleasant experience. "And," he adds, "perhaps even a normal and healthy one." He continues: "Masturbation lost its aura of sinfulness because of new understanding, and this sudden metamorphosis in an almost universal attitude is more significant of the changed temper, philosophy and morality of the 20th century than any other phenomenon I can think of."

Not that Dr. Karl wants masturbation to be again considered a sin. But he regrets that the notion of all other sins seems to have vanished as well. Society's new views of sexual morality have not been accompanied by any fresh understanding of ruthlessness or cruelty, of rape and other forms of violence. To Moralist Menninger, these are not just crimes but sins as well, as are assaults upon the environment. Having grown up in harmony with nature, he insists that so-called civilized societies must do the same.

In his Chicago office last week, surrounded by Navajo rugs, kachina dolls, pre-Columbian objects and his own abstract paintings, Dr. Karl flipped through Sparks. Its title comes from Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": "Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!" Gruffly the doctor remarked, "Perhaps the title is too flattering to me." But the fact is that with his encyclopedic knowledge, insatiable curiosity, moral strictures and unflagging energy, Dr. Karl, in his 81st year, still throws off sparks aplenty.

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