Menninger could not see into the future.

I write almost exactly 40 years after the publication of this book.

My critique of Menninger comes precisely from the place where he could not see.

That contributes to the beauty of what I am about to say, which is also what I have been saying.

The answer to the title question, Whatever became of sin?, is “political incorrectness replaced the term”.

This implies that the horizontal axis that Menninger attributed to “sin”, that is, “crime(sin(symptom))” is actually “crime(political incorrectness(symptom))”.

In short, Menninger confounded the Progressive symbolic order with the Christian symbolic order.

He could not see the future development of the Public Cult of Progressivism.  He was immersed in it.   In the late 1960’s, the Public Cult of Progressivism and the private cults of the New Age Movement (white magic) and Satanism (dark magic) were “in the water”.

As a trained psychoanalyst, Menninger could “hear” (that the word “sin” was no longer used) but he could not fully “interpret” (what the loss implied).  So he presented the “interpretation” that he had at the moment.  Like all psychoanalytic interpretations, what he wrote was provisional.