Personal Psychopathology: Early Formulations

Personal Psychopathology: Early Formulations is the first book Harry Stack Sullivan wrote and the last of his books to be published. He wrote it between about 1929 and 1933, as his years of clinical research on schizophrenia at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital gave way to private practice in New York. On the advice of friends he did not publish it, and it circulated only in manuscript; W. W. Norton brought it out in 1972, prepared under the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation's committee on the publication of his writings, with a preface by Mabel Blake Cohen and an introduction by Helen Swick Perry. It is his first attempt at a systematic account of personality and its disorders. Sullivan follows the growth of personality through infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence and adolescence, and treats the person as shaped at every stage by relations with others and by the culture in which those relations take place; the self takes form in them and protects itself against anxiety by shutting out and dissociating what it cannot accept. He gives particular weight to preadolescence, when an intimate friendship with a peer of the same sex first makes closeness and love possible, and he writes about sexuality with a frankness unusual for its time, notably in a chapter on male adolescence that sets sexual practices, personality development and social prohibitions against one another. Mental disorders, the schizophrenic states above all, appear as outcomes of a person's history of relations within a particular social setting rather than as impersonal disease entities. The publisher presents the book as the link between the clinical papers collected in Schizophrenia as a Human Process and the social-scientific essays of The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science, and as an early sign of Sullivan's changing view of psychopathology. Because of its candour about sexuality it has also been read, more than his other writings, as a key to his own life.