Menninger, Karl Augustus [key], 1893–1990, and William Claire Menninger, 1899–1966, American psychiatrists, brothers, b. Topeka, Kans. The Menninger Clinic, conceived with the idea of collecting many specialists in one center, was founded in Topeka in 1919 by Karl and his father, Charles Frederick (1862–1953); in 1925 they were joined by William. The Menninger Foundation, established for research, training, and public education in psychiatry, came into existence in 1941 and soon became a U.S. psychiatric and psychoanalytic center. At the close of World War II, Karl Menninger was instrumental in founding the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Topeka, which functioned as a mental hospital and as the center of the largest psychiatric training program in the world. In 2003 the clinic, much smaller than in its heyday, moved to the Houston area, where it continues in association with the Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital.
See K. Menninger's The Vital Balance (1963) and Whatever Became of Sin? (1973, repr. 1988) and H. J. Faulkner and V. Pruitt, ed., The Selected Correspondence of Karl A. Menninger, 1919–1945 (1989) and The Selected Correspondence of Karl A. Menninger, 1946–1965 (1995); W. Menninger's Psychiatry in a Troubled World (1948) and A Psychiatrist for a Troubled World (1967).
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