Karl A. Menninger Quotations

It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.

Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.

We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, 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.

We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.

TO 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.

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.

To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.

Chess is a more highly symbolic game, but the aggressions are therefore even more frankly represented in the play. It probably began as a war game; that is, the representation of a miniature battle between the forces of two kingdoms

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear.

One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.