The Unpublished Menninger: Divorce, Marriage, and Analyses

Editing the correspondence, like writing the "authorized" biography, of a living person often creates a scholarly and ethical dilemma for a researcher. Although the authors knew they had the legal right to publish what they chose from Karl Menninger's correspondence, they also knew that simply by closing the archives to them, Menninger could circumvent legal niceties. Four sets of letters were left out of their two volumes of Menninger's professional correspondence; all of these omitted letters concern the same subjects—his divorce and remarriage and the two periods of psychoanalysis that coincided with the decisive moments in his romantic and erotic attachments. The longest and bitterest of the exchanges is with Leo Rosten, for whom Menninger's second wife worked briefly during the prolonged period of Menninger's divorce negotiations with his first wife. Exchanges with Menninger's own analysts, Franz Alexander and Ruth Mack Brunswick, and his reflections about them, also reveal intimate details of his personal life and psychological make-up. Printed here for the first time, the letters and commentary, although not always flattering, provide new insight into the workings of the keenest mind, albeit an often divided one, in 1930s psychiatry as well as more fully exposing Menninger's relationships—both personal and professional—with his family and his colleagues.