Menninger muses: Insane or in sin?



(By:  Moreau.henri)

According to its website, The Menninger Clinic has been ranked “one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the country” by U.S. News and World Report for 17 years in a row.

Reading this, people might therefore associate both the clinic and the Menninger name with the very best that science has to offer.  Indeed, people come there from far and wide to receive help with such complex issues as “difficult to treat brain, behavioral, and addictive disorders.”   Although the clinic was founded by a father (Charles Frederick Menninger) and son (Karl Menninger) team of psychiatrists (with the later addition of another son, William), it is usually Karl Menninger whom the public remembers most.

Karl Menninger certainly began his psychiatric journey by treading what looked to be “a straight-and-narrow” scientific pathway.  According to Wikipedia, he graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School, and later taught there.  In his 1930 book, The Human Mind, Menninger “argued that psychiatry was a science.”  However, a “little blue book” by L. M. Birkhead was published the very next year.  It’s title?  From sin to psychiatry: An interview on the way to mental health with Dr. Karl A. Menninger…

The relationship between sin and mental illness remained a dominant theme in Menninger’s work for years to come.  In 1973, Menninger authored a book called Whatever Became of Sin?  Archbishop Fulton Sheen thought so highly of this book that he referenced it in his own work, Through the Year With Fulton Sheen.

In this day-by-day inspirational book, Sheen’s October 17 passage read:  So general has the denial of sin been, that it has not been theologians who have resurrected the idea, but psychiatrists…  we have many complexes that are produced by sin, and we are blind to the true cause, which is guilt. 

As traditional as this “back to sin” approach sounds, Menninger also demonstrated openness to somewhat radical-sounding theories.  In a now-famous letter to Thomas Szasz (the psychiatrist who was known to have compared the mental health movement to the Inquisition), Menninger appears to embrace at least some of

Szasz’ ideas.  Menninger’s letter states:  Long ago I noticed that some of our very sick patients surprised us by getting well even without much of our “treatment…”  We didn’t know why.  But it seemed to some of us that kind of the “sickness” that we had seen was a kind of conversion experience…

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menninger

http://books.google.com/books?id=gEuakFdoPnUC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=karl+menninger+and+fulton+sheen&source=bl&ots=hw_sXdcX_K&sig=vx7A3FjuKd19e4q92ePB45PjPXU&hl=en&ei=nB4mTtyuB4jZ0QHQ7cDmCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.menningerclinic.com/about/Menninger-history.htm

http://www.menningerclinic.com/about/facts.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz

http://www.szasz.com/menninger.html

Copyright July 22, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved