Person
Harry Stack Sullivan
American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded the interpersonal school, holding that personality exists only in the field of a person's relations with others and that psychiatry is the study of those relations. He became known for the intensive psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, and in Washington he founded the journal Psychiatry and led the Washington School of Psychiatry. Most of his theory reached print only after his death, in books edited from his lectures.
- Born
- 1892
- Died
- 1949
- Influenced
influenced by
- Sándor Ferenczi 1926 After hearing Ferenczi lecture in New York in 1926, Sullivan urged Clara Thompson to be analysed by him so that the two of them could learn his technique.
- Sigmund Freud Sullivan counted Freud among the three founders of a complete psychiatry and kept his attention to processes outside awareness and to the treatment relationship, while setting aside the libido theory.
- Adolf Meyer From Meyer's psychobiology Sullivan took the study of the whole person in their life situation; in the 1920s, working near Baltimore, he was in close contact with Meyer's circle at Johns Hopkins.
introduced
- Interpersonal psychoanalysis Sullivan defined psychiatry as the study of what goes on between people, and built his theory of personality, development and mental disorder on that definition; the 1939 lectures published as Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry were its first systematic statement.
- Participant observation Sullivan made the psychiatrist's participation in the interpersonal situation the root premise of psychiatric method, and worked it out for clinical practice in his lectures on the psychiatric interview.
- Parataxic distortion Sullivan illustrated the term with a patient who, after hundreds of hours, discovered that she had been seeing him as a fat old man with white hair.
collaborated with
- Edward Sapir From the late 1920s until Sapir's death in 1939 the two worked together to bring psychiatry and the social sciences into one field of inquiry.
- Clara Thompson Friends and colleagues from the early 1920s, Sullivan and Thompson worked together for the rest of his life, and in 1943 both were among the founders of the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry, later the William Alanson White Institute.
- Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Colleagues in Washington from the later 1930s: both taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Sullivan lectured to the staff of Chestnut Lodge, where Fromm-Reichmann worked, and both took part in founding the William Alanson White Institute.