Sullivan Revisited—Life and Work. Harry Stack Sullivan's Relevance for Contemporary Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, by Marco Conci, translated by Laurie Cohen and David Lee,  Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, Trento, Italy, 2010,  564pp.

Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. (Harry Stack Sullivan, 1953, p. 216)

This is but one of the many gems to savor in Marco Conci's thoroughly enjoyable, utterly comprehensible opus on the life and work of Harry Stack Sullivan.1 And as Conci makes clear from the outset, to properly grasp Sullivan and his wry outlook on human relations, we must first understand the man himself and his distinct cultural milieu. We thus learn about Sullivan the boy, those who influenced his thinking and his historical/scientific context, as Conci weaves a “dialogue and integration between the two poles of European thoroughness and American openness” (p. 13).

Conci, an Italian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (trained in Italy and Germany and works in both countries), was stimulated by the seminars of Stephen Mitchell and Jay Greenberg in 1988 in Florence. Their belief that Sullivan has been roundly derided