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In the 1930s Harry Stack Sullivan asked a friend, the design artist John Vassos, to etch for him a special emblem (Perry 1982, 342). What Sullivan was trying to say about himself through this symbol has never been clearly explained. His foster son, James Sullivan, thought it was intended as a puzzle with a surface and a hidden meaning: “This symbol with slight modification was reconverted from the Chinese symbol representing Eternal Life. Studied carefully—by those intelligent, the social scientists, psychiatrists, etc., this symbol represents something else. Follow its line and you will discover” (quoted in Perry, 343). Yet even if we admit the possibility that the design encodes a secret message, James' interpretation of its surface meaning seems inconsistent with what we know about Sullivan, for even though he collected Chinese antiques, there is no indication that Chinese religion or philosophy played any role in his thinking. It is more plausible to assume