You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry presents Harry Stack Sullivan's last complete statement of his conceptions about normal and troubled human development. Like most of the volumes containing his work, it was not written by him for publication, but rather was compiled post-humously from lectures and lecture notes, and edited into coherent book form. Most of what is in this volume is taken from his 1946-1947 lecture notes for the Washington School of Psychiatry, Sullivan's primary base (he died in 1949). Though his editors did an excellent job in translation from verbal lecture to printed word, the writing is nonetheless more colloquial than most professional writing, and indeed often reads more like spoken than written text. Sullivan's wry, sarcastic humor is sprinkled throughout, though for some this translation from spoken to written text makes for laborious reading. Sullivan is far too pragmatic to be highly abstract and intellectualized, as so many analytic writers are, but he can be wordy and his idiosyncratic personality can leave readers less than fully engaged. Aside from factors related to the politics of psychoanalysis, his written works have not had as wide an exposure as they might have were he more of a pleasure to read. Given his profound significance in today's psychoanalysis, his work is in general less carefully read than one might expect, even by those identified as within the contemporary interpersonal or relational analytic traditions.
This particular volume, perhaps his most important, represents Sullivan's explication of the development of personality from early infancy through adolescence to early adulthood. I believe it is the first developmental text in psychoanalysis that emphasizes the essence of human development as a function of social/interpersonal interaction. Sullivan's developmental thought elaborates Sandor Ferenczi's broad but not detailed views on personality formation, the first to veer away