Menninger Family

   Charles Frederick Menninger (1862–1953)

   Founder of the psychoanalytically oriented Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, C. F. M. was born in a small town in Indiana, into the family of a miller. Graduating with an M.D. from the Kansas Medical College in Topeka in 1908 (after a previous homeopathy M.D. from Chicago), he visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and wanted to reproduce that achievement in Topeka. In 1919, together with his son Karl, he established the Menninger Diagnostic Clinic. Yet as another son, William, joined the clinic, its orientation became increasingly psychiatric. In 1941, C. F. M. created the Menninger Foundation to encourage psychiatric training; in 1945, the Menninger Sanitarium joined the Foundation, and in 1954 the Charles Frederick Menninger Memorial Hospital opened, 1 year after C. F. M.’s death.

   Karl Augustus Menninger (1893–1990)

   Born in Topeka, Kansas, he graduated with an M.D. from Harvard University in 1917. After training in neuropathology at Harvard from 1918 to 1920, he returned to Topeka to help his father found the family clinic in 1919 (see above), where he served as the Foundation’s director of education. In 1931, under Franz Alexander’s (1891–1964) leadership, K. A. M. was one of the founding members of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society. He was active in the world of American psychoanalysis and is remembered for Man Against Himself (1938) and The Vital Balance (1963). Among other achievements, in 1934 in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, he coined the term "polysurgery addiction," a form of hysteria. (See Hysteria.)

   William Claire Menninger (1899–1966)

   Born in Topeka, he graduated with an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1924 and the following year joined the staff of the family clinic. In 1927, he trained in psychiatry for a year at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., returned to Topeka to the family clinic, then studied psychoanalysis between 1934 and 1935 at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. For the rest of his career, he held various positions at the clinic, including general secretary after 1946. In 1948–1949, he was president of the American Psychiatric Association and between 1947 and 1949 president as well of the American Psychoanalytic Association. During the Second World War, in the United States Army Medical Corps he was director of neuropsychiatry, where he promoted the expansion of psychiatry in the public. In 1946, he became the founding chairman of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), a ginger group within psychiatry encouraging psychoanalysis.