Book
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.
Main ideas
- Perry reads Sullivan's life through his own interpersonal theory: a person shaped by his relations with others and by a specific American setting, from which he came to a distinctively American psychiatry.
- His boyhood as an Irish Catholic farm child among Protestant neighbours in Chenango County, with an emotionally distant mother, left him isolated; Perry traces the roots of his theory to this impoverished early world and to his own fragility.
- The book brings to light his friendship with an older boy, Clarence Bellinger, later also a psychiatrist, and links it to the importance Sullivan gave the preadolescent chum.
- Perry accepts that Sullivan suffered a schizophrenic episode as a young man, after his suspension from Cornell, and concludes that he was probably hospitalized at Bellevue, while stating that no record of it has been found.
- Sullivan's career is shown as built on slender formal credentials but sustained by clinical gift: his years with William Alanson White at St Elizabeths and his research with schizophrenic patients at Sheppard Pratt.
- His thought grew in a network of colleagues across disciplines — Clara Thompson, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Harold Lasswell — through which he sought to unite psychiatry with anthropology and the other social sciences.
- Through the institutions he founded in Washington and through public service, from Selective Service screening to postwar mental-health work, Sullivan's influence reached well beyond the consulting room.
- The portrait is sympathetic but not uncritical: it records the debts, extravagance and manipulativeness behind his reputation for opportunism, and treats his long partnership with James Inscoe with discretion.
- Written by a close associate and editor of his work, the book became the standard life of Sullivan; reviewers admired its research while some faulted its speculation or found it stronger on his career than on the man.
What it shows
Sigmund Freud influenced Harry Stack Sullivan
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 influenced Harry Stack Sullivan
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.
William Alanson White influenced Harry Stack Sullivan
Sullivan worked under White at St Elizabeths Hospital in the early 1920s and regarded him as his chief mentor; the 1939 lectures that became Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry were the first William Alanson White Memorial Lectures.
Edward Sapir influenced Harry Stack Sullivan
Sullivan drew on Sapir's linguistics and on his view that culture is lived in the relations between particular people; the lectures cite Sapir's writings on language repeatedly.
Harry Stack Sullivan 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.
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Clara Thompson analysed Harry Stack Sullivan
Having gone to Ferenczi for analysis at Sullivan's urging, Thompson attempted an analysis of Sullivan about two years after her return to New York, in the mid-1930s.
Harry Stack Sullivan collaborated with 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.
Harry Stack Sullivan collaborated with 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.
Harry Stack Sullivan influenced Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
Sullivan's interpersonal approach to schizophrenia shaped the intensive psychotherapy Fromm-Reichmann practised at Chestnut Lodge.
Harry Stack Sullivan collaborated with Erich Fromm
Sullivan published Fromm's essay on selfishness and self-love in his journal Psychiatry in 1939 and cited it as close to his own view; Fromm taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry and in 1943 was among the founders of what became the William Alanson White Institute.
Harry Stack Sullivan collaborated with Karen Horney
In the late 1930s Sullivan, Horney, Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm met as an informal discussion group in New York and came to be grouped together as the culturalist school, an alliance that broke apart in the early 1940s.