The Dream of New Psychiatry: William C. Menninger and Psychoanalysis

After World War II, psychiatry eagerly wanted to reform the discipline and develop its systematic structure. Among many who tried to establish a new structure of discipline, there is William C. Menninger who ranked the highest level, Brigadier General, during WWII. Delving into the career of William C. Menninger and his scholarly works, this paper strives to capture his quest for rebuilding psychiatry by adopting the theory of psychoanalysis into psychiatry. As a psychiatrist, who had both military and non-military experiences of medicine, and who had been trained as a psychoanalyst himself, Menninger tried to effectively organize psychiatry, so that the discipline could become the spearhead to build a healthy and sane American society. However, the reality that psychiatry had faced during the war was not promising in that sense. At the turn of the century, the discipline had been immersed itself into either state hospitals or individual clinics. These limited experiences could not be utilized for unprecedented large-scale warfare. Menninger, with his experiences during the war, figured out the differences between the goal of military psychiatry and civilian psychiatry. Especially, while the war had been close to the end, there was urgent need to make psychiatry fit in the post-war environment. Menninger believed that it should be psychiatry that could manage this drastic environmental changes by appropriating the psychodynamic theory from psychoanalysis.