By the 1960s, American institutional psychiatry was a very large elephant caught in a seemingly inexhaustible growth spurt. “Nothing of human concern is really outside psychiatry,” proclaimed Dr. Karl Menninger, the profession’s unofficial dean. “So in one sense I have no hobbies. They are all part of my work.” This was to be the beginning of a golden age in psychiatry’s relationship with the American public. Psychoanalysis was busily remaking psychiatry after its own image—a new medicine born equally of natural and spiritual sciences. Practitioners were more than mere medics, they were soul doctors. The profession, as one practitioner predicted,...