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...
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