Man Against Him Self | Karl A. Menninger
MAN against HIMSELF BY KARL A. MENNINGER Harcourt, Brace World, Inc. - New York CO YR. IG JEL T, XQ3S, BY MKIC 1STINGER. or portions th reof in cti-iy form - IX. by TNT THOSE WHO WOULD USE INTELLIGENCE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEATH TO STRENGTHEN THE WILL TO LIVE AGAINST THE WISH TO DIE, AND TO REPLACE WITH LOVE THE BLIND COMPULSION TO GIVE HOSTAGES TO HATRED AS THE PRICE OF LIVING Preface IT IS nothing new that the world is full o hate, that men destroy one another, and that our civilization has arisen from the ashes of despoiled peoples and decimated natural resources. But to relate this destructiveness, this evidence of a spiritual malignancy within us, to an instinct, and to correlate this instinct with the beneficent and fruitful instinct associated with love, this was one of the later flowers of the genius of Freud. We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expedi tiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy. It js true, nevertheless, that in the end each man kills himself in his own selecte3 way, nEasf or slow, soon or late. We all feel this, vaguely j there are solHany occasions to witness it before our eyes. The methods are legion and it is these which attract our attention. Some of them interest surgeons, some of them interest lawyers and priests, some of them interest heart specialists, some of them interest sociologists. All of them must interest the man who sees the personality as a totality and medicine as the healing of the nations. I believe that our best defenseagainst self-destructiveness lies in the courageous application of intelligence to human phenom enology. If such is our nature, it were better that we knew it and knew it in all its protean manifestations. To see all forms of self destruction from the standpoint of their dominant principles would seem to be logical progress toward self-preservation and toward a unified view of medical science. This book is an attempt to synthesize and to carry forward, in that direction, the work begun by Ferenczi, Groddeck, Jelliffe, White, Alexander, Simmel, and others who have consistently ap vii Vlll PREFACE plied these principles to the understanding of human sickness and all those failures and capitulations that we propose to regard as variant forms of suicide. No one is more aware than I of the un evenness of the evidence to follow and of the speculative nature of some of the theory, but in this I beg the indulgence of the reader to whom I submit that to have a theory, even a false one, is better than to attribute events to pure chance. Chance explanations leave us in the dark 5 a theory will lead to confirmation or rejection. K. A. M. Acknowledgments I AM indebted to many people for help in the recording and exposition of the views in this book. I am indebted for an early reading of the manuscript and for valuable suggestions resulting therefrom to my colleague and former teacher, Dr. Franz Alexander of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to Dr. Franklin C. McLean of the University of Chicago, to Dr. J. F. Brown of the University of Kansas also research associate in psychology at our Clinic and to Nelson Antrim Crawford of Topeka, editor of The Household Magazine. In a more general way, Iam indebted also to my colleagues of the Menninger Clinic with all of whom I have discussed the ideas herein expressed and some of whom read the manuscript in its first draft. From the late Dr. William A. White we received in 1933 a grant of 2,500 for some special studies of suicidally inclined persons, a gift on behalf of an anonymous donor. These studies formed a part of the clinical basis for the general theory of suicide elaborated in Part II of this book...
Man Against Him Self | 
