The Menningers of Kansas

Happenstance caused me to pull a volume from a shelf, a book I must have obtained in the 1960s but had but briefly skimmed then. Some vague memories remained, but the volume still had its dust jacket; dust jackets routinely come off when I read a book with care, hence I hadn’t. The book was Karl A. Menninger’s The Vital Balance: The Life Process in Mental Health and Illness. This time I read the book. In that process I discovered the reason why, nearly 50 years ago, I had put it aside, and also why I shouldn’t have. Every sincere and learned effort has value, and Menninger, one of the apostles of Freudian psychology, was a man of merit and worth.

Living in Kansas City from the early 1950s to about 1970 with some interruptions, we were quite aware of the Menninger Clinic in nearby Topeka, Kansas (in Houston since 2005), an institution that ranks up there with the Mayo. Learning more now, I discovered, for instance, that Charles F. Menninger, Karl’s father, together with William W. Mayo, have a day dedicated to them (March 6) in the Episcopal Church (USA)’s liturgical calendar! The Wikipedia page that told me this is also labeled Saints portal—which tells the astute reader a good many interesting things about cultural fusions and such in these Latter Days. In any case, the Menninger Clinic was founded by C.F. Menninger and his sons Karl A. and William C., all three psychiatrists. The third and middle son, Edwin A. Menninger, became a journalist, the founder of a paper in Florida, and a great promoter of flowering trees, which is not a bad divergence from the family profession if diverge you must. Edwin also wrote a book called Fantastic Trees.

The most famous Menninger was Karl (1893-1990), principally owing to his writings. Best known of these are The Human Mind, his first, Man Against Himself, and The Vital Balance. While Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is permanently linked to the concept of sex, the libido, the life drive, Karl Menninger’s work is centered on Freud’s lesser-known death drive that others, later, labeled Thanatos, after the Greek personification of death. Human existence is the battle between life and death, played out in each individual, both being drives, a favorite Freudian concept (in German Trieb). Menninger’s Man Against Himself, is a detailed analysis of this darker drive, which manifests as aggression and destruction. And his The Vital Balance is an attempt to show in fine detail how the right balancing of these two drives produces the fully-developed human being.

It is undoubtedly useful to see reality, occasionally, through lenses quite differently fashioned than my own, and reading Menninger is an example. Does modernity also have its own projection of a Fallen World? Oh, yes. It does when it is serious—and Menninger was serious above all. Also an eloquent writer on the most arcane and difficult subject, the human soul, albeit that word, when used at all by him, gets quotes around it. Something in that Freudian lens, however, blocks out some of the light. When Menninger refers to transcendence, he uses that word to mean a better adaptation; to use his own phrasing, when you transcend the destructive and the libidinal drives, you are “weller than well.” And, in the end, Thanatos has the last word after all…

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The flowering tree shown is the Tabebuia, courtesy of Mary616 (link), which also has more information on Edwin A. Menninger.

One Ring

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

[J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring]

It seems to me that with increasing complexity, reality, as it were, becomes more dense, substantial, and therefore meaningful. The corollary? As a system declines, it breaks apart and loses its complexity. Its parts no longer talk; in consequence something is lost. One of the interesting phenomena observable in the centuries since the French Revolution (to pick a date more or less at random—thus to mark the passage from one state to another) has been the rise of “single-minded” explanations of everything conceivable, in and beyond philosophy.

To document this with a gesture or two, consider George Berkeley’s Perception (a radical idealism) and Karl Marx’s Materialism, Schopenhauer’s Will and Sigmund Freud’s Libido. In the political arena we have Patrick Henry’s slogan, “Give me liberty or give me death,” vulgarized into freedom as the only value. And then we have Friedrich Hayek, beloved of right-wing propagandists. He associated the rise of civilization with private property and gave the price mechanism the same exalted role as language. These two concepts, fused together, give us the one ring that’s supposed to rule us all, the Free Market.

I can’t help but contrast our stark, monistic world with that of the organically interwoven character of the medieval, with its great estates, its hierarchical arrangements, is complex balances of obligations, sophisticated philosophies, beautiful architecture, intricate morality, and its infinite, vertical vector.

Now I’m not stupid enough to think that the balance of evil has shifted. One needs but study those times to know medieval talent for mischief, its brazen embrace of hypocrisy, its depth of cruelty. We didn’t invent torture to deal with Al Qaida. But in that time, when physical life was a great deal harder, it was easier to find life’s meaning. In that system the One remained transcendent; in ours it has sunk into the fogs and mists; in its descent it has lost all virtues except power; and here it serves dark lords who cynically rule in secret.

Tolkien—as great poets sometimes succeed in doing—wonderfully diagnosed the sickness of his age. He also knew the solution. The power of that ring must be resisted. We must recover our gift to think and feel comprehensively. The least, it seems, must lead—the Hobbits among us, the stout, the brave. Frodo is everyman. In fear and trembling he climbed the steep sides of Mount Doom and tossed the cursed ring into lava.

A good start might be reading The Lord of the Rings rather than just seeing the movie. Good Lord! Three books? Look at all those pages, pages, pages….