Reflections on the Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan

It is a very ambitious undertaking to attempt to convey much about Sullivan within the limits of a paper. I will do the best I can, touching briefly on his personality, terminologies, developmental concepts, theories, and therapy in the simplest way possible. I wonder whether I will succeed in communicating what I found so marvelous about him. If nothing else, for his understanding of the mother-child relationship, there is simply no other with his profound insights. As a last comment here, I believe that Sullivan's style could not be copied, but his ideas could. These ideas, incidentally, have never been completely abstracted from his tendency to express them in anecdotal form. I believe a major task still remains to be done, but it is obviously beyond the bounds of this presentation.

Born in 1892, and living his early years as an only child on an isolated farm, Harry Stack Sullivan appeared on the psychiatric scene in the period of the 1920s—a time of great ferment, when the spotlight had turned from (but of course did not desert) progress in the scientific, medical, physical world to humans and the understanding of their behavior.

The great stimulus, of course, came from Freud, but on the American scene, in philosophy and education there was John Dewey; in psychiatry there was William Alanson White—who might be considered really a developer of psychiatrists. The Behaviorists and the Constitutionalists were speculating about factors genetic to mental illness, and Adolph Meyer in Baltimore was elaborating his psychobiological concepts, or, as he called it, his system of Ergasiology.

Into this milieu appeared Sullivan—a strange, gifted, and paradoxical person who, in my view, probably approached or even superseded the genius of Freud, in terms of penetrating perception, therapy, and theorizing—if not in bulk, and literary or artistic finesse. The works of many psychiatrists and psychoanalysts—a list including Spitz, Greenacre, Rado, Bowlby, and now