Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan

Psychiatrist of America is the standard biography of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), published in 1982 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Its author, Helen Swick Perry, had worked with Sullivan in his last years and afterwards edited the books assembled from his lectures and manuscripts, so the book joins a colleague's acquaintance to long research in the record. Perry tells the life in the spirit of Sullivan's own interpersonal psychiatry, as a person formed by relations with others and by a particular American place and time. She begins with his parents' Irish Catholic families and his boyhood on a farm near Smyrna in Chenango County, New York, where he grew up isolated among Protestant neighbours with a mother who gave him little warmth; she finds there the friendship with an older boy, Clarence Bellinger, that bears on his later account of the preadolescent chum. She treats his suspension from Cornell and the years after it, his probable schizophrenic episode in youth (she concludes he was likely confined at Bellevue, though no record survives), his thin medical credentials, his years with William Alanson White at St Elizabeths Hospital and his schizophrenia research at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, his analysis with Clara Thompson, and his collaboration with Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Harold Lasswell and others in joining psychiatry to the social sciences. The later chapters follow the institutions he built in Washington — the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, the Washington School of Psychiatry and the journal Psychiatry — and his public work, from psychiatric screening for Selective Service to wartime and postwar efforts in mental health and international understanding, up to his death in Paris in 1949. Perry is protective of her subject without hiding what his critics saw: debts, extravagance, manipulation and a reputation for opportunism; she writes with discretion about his long domestic life with James Inscoe. She names the gaps in the record openly and fills some with conjecture. Reviewers praised the depth of the research and the book's picture of how Sullivan reached psychiatry, psychoanalysis, the social sciences and public policy, while some found it speculative, or more convincing about his professional life than about the man himself.