Includes bibliographical references.

Acknowledgments -- A Brief and Biased Review of Moral History -- What is Wrong? -- The Disappearance of Sin: An Eyewitness Account -- A New Social Morality -- Sin into Crime -- Sin into Symptom -- Sin as Collective Irresponsibility -- The Old Seven Deadly Sins (and Some New Ones) -- Sin, So What? -- The Bluebird on the Dung Heap -- Epilogue -- The Displaced Preface -- Index

For many years the name Karl Menninger has been almost synonymous in America with the science and practice of psychiatry. His book The Human Mind introduced that branch of medicine to the American public in 1930. From this psychiatrist comes now a book seemingly remote from medicine and psychiatry Dr. Menninger here concentrates not on the mental sickness from which men suffer but on their moral sicknesses. He revives a word we seldom hear today but which was once very important. He submits that there really is such a thing as sin, indeed, that there is today, under various guises, much and serious sin and that the consequences of the sins of all of us blur and diminish our lives. Not until the Epilogue, which he calls a deferred preface, does the author tell us how he came to write this book and how he has come from many years of experience to consider moral values an essential aspect of psychiatry. If, as he believes, mental health and moral health are identical, the recognition of the reality of sin offers to the suffering, struggling, anxious world a real hope not of belated treatment but of prevention. This task enlist the physician, the psychiatrist, the teacher, and the mother in a common army–an army against self-destruction and world destruction.