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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?