Preface

Abstract

Preface Peter L. Rudnytsky I owe the inspiration for this issue of American Imago to Howard Faulkner and Virginia Pruitt, who submitted their manuscript, "The Unpublished Menninger," in March 2006. Despite its length, it was clear to me that this monograph recounting their experiences as the editors of Karl Menninger's correspondence, and detailing the material that they had been obliged to omit from their two published volumes, was eminently worth accepting. With the paper by Faulkner and Pruitt as my centerpiece, I then sought to burnish the issue by soliciting contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts who were associated with the Menninger School of Psychiatry in its heyday, and who could thus supplement the scholarly narrative of Faulkner and Pruitt from their unique first-hand vantage points. Emboldened by his previous acts of kindness, I began by contacting Robert Wallerstein, who offered to furnish a "personal perspective" on Karl Menninger the man. Next, at the Winter Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I sought out Howard Shevrin, who consented to address the research component of the Menninger enterprise. Finally, in May, at a lecture by Eric Kandel at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, I serendipitously encountered Herbert Schlesinger, who yielded to my entreaties and found the time to complete his paper, "The Treatment Program at Menninger," by my altogether unrealistic deadline. Having drawn three kings to go with my aces in the hole, I am now confident that this full house will supply the wherewithal for anyone who wants to travel back to the bright, shining moment when Topeka, Kansas, became the Camelot of American psychoanalysis. Although Faulkner and Pruitt come in, as it were, near the end of the story—in the mid-1980s, when Karl Menninger was already over ninety—they, too, had personal contact with the great man. In psychoanalytic fashion, their attempt to secure Menninger's cooperation in preparing their edition of [End Page 135] his correspondence led not only to a reawakening of his past but also to a reenactment of earlier dynamics in their present relationship. Thus, just as Wallerstein describes his own indignation at being subjected to the "almost mandatory blow-up" that marred Menninger's dealings with his associates, so, too, Faulkner and Pruitt recount how Menninger, after an initial honeymoon period, turned on them with accusations of betrayal and dramatically introduced them to his lawyer as his "former friends" after they showed him a prepublication version of their manuscript. The purely subjective basis for Menninger's recriminations is all the more apparent because Faulkner and Pruitt had in fact taken pains to suppress from their two volumes any letters having to do with the most sensitive areas of his personal life: his divorce from his first wife, Grace Gaines Menninger, and subsequent remarriage to Jean Lyle Menninger, as well as his experiences of analysis first with Franz Alexander in Chicago and then with Ruth Mack Brunswick in New York. Now, Faulkner and Pruitt are making public all their archival discoveries that discretion had led them to withhold during Menninger's lifetime. Although their work will be of great interest to intellectual historians and scholars of psychoanalysis, Faulkner and Pruitt's engrossing study does not cast Menninger in a favorable light. Writing to Jean Lyle in 1940 about his acrimonious conflict with the popular writer and sociological researcher, Leo Rosten, for whom Lyle had briefly worked in Hollywood while Menninger was trying to extricate himself from his marriage to Grace, Menninger brazenly assures his mistress, "I can do some lying too." Despite being told by Menninger himself, the tale that emerges of Rosten's alleged highhandedness toward Lyle lacks credibility and indeed seems to warrant Rosten's castigation of Menninger's behavior as "paranoid" and "hysterical." Menninger was certainly not the first psychoanalyst to have understood Freud's teaching as a warning, in Faulkner and Pruitt's phrase, against the "danger of repression," or to have appealed to this doctrine to justify his extramarital affairs. But it remains disconcerting to see a spin-off from the Dora case play itself out in the American heartland during the late 1920s. In handwritten letters that mysteriously disappeared from the archives more than five years after...