Clinical Studies in Psychiatry

A selection from the clinical lectures Harry Stack Sullivan gave to the staff of Chestnut Lodge, the psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, between October 1942 and April 1946, published after his death by W. W. Norton in 1956 and later counted as the second volume of his collected works. The editors, Helen Swick Perry, Mary Ladd Gawel and Martha Gibbon, kept about 130,000 of more than a million words, most of them from lectures given between April and November 1943. Where Sullivan's other posthumous books set out the interpersonal theory of development and the psychiatric interview, this one shows the clinician applying that theory to the disorders met in practice. After a statement of the interpersonal theory of mental disorder, it treats the processes by which anxiety is kept out of awareness — selective inattention, sublimation, dissociation and the paranoid dynamism — and the emotions, among them envy and jealousy, that can precipitate a major disorder. It then reads hysteria, obsessionalism, hypochondria, manic-depressive psychosis, schizophrenia and paranoid states as patterns of interpersonal living, and closes with the use of clinical entities as a frame of reference in therapy and with the psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients.