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.