SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Criminal Mind Was Open Book to Karl Menninger

Editor’s Note: Dr. Karl A. Menninger, recognized by many as the father of American psychiatry, died last week at the age of 96. The co-founder of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., a mecca for psychiatric training, Menninger was a pioneer in analyzing and treating the human condition.

Among other things, he espoused the view that criminals should be treated rather than punished. Much criminal behavior, he said, is a pathological reaction to severe punishment suffered earlier in life; further punishment, he said, will only worsen the situation.

Menninger articulated his views in a number of books. The following are excerpted from Menninger’s works.

“When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course,, the situation is too tough for him.

In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it usually misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.”

-- The Human Mind, 1930.

“The adjuration to be ‘normal’ seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level.”

-- The Human Mind, 1930

“Life is too precious to waste or to be wasted. Our country is too beautiful to be selfishly ravished. Our world, for all the scars we have inflicted upon it, is still too wonderful, too magnificent, too holy, may I say, to be destroyed by our sloth, our pettiness, our hates, our heedlessness, our failure to use our intelligence.”

-- Sparks, 1973

“I don’t believe we can murder people in the name of God, law, justice or humanity, no matter how we construe it.”

-- Crime of Punishment, 1968

“The words of Freud were not intended as poetry or as religion, but as scientific theory. Yet psychiatrists are almost the only scientists who use the word love in their professional work without embarrassment or apology. Love is the touchstone of psychiatric treatment.”

-- The Progressive, 1955

“It is nothing new that the world is full of hate, that men destroy one another, and that our civilization has arisen from the ashes of despoiled peoples and decimated natural resources.”

--Man Against Himself, 1938