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.
Harry Stack Sullivan's writing and teaching, based on his work with patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Sheppard Pratt, and finally at Chestnut Lodge, mark him as a pioneer in extending, revising, and rejecting various aspects of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Helen Swick Perry's 1982 biography of Sullivan, runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize, has been the definitive text on the life and work of this giant of American psychiatry. Now Marco Conci, an Italian psychoanalyst and prolific scholar of all things related to Sullivan, has written a magnificently comprehensive book that includes the history of early developments in the discipline of psychiatry in the United States, a biographical review of Sullivan's life, and a systematic annotated reading of his major writings. Conci's project is clearly one of love and devotion to his subject. Perhaps it takes an analyst from afar to bring us fresh news about the ongoing relevance of one of our own.
For various reasons, Sullivan has been a minor figure in many psychoanalytic institutes, while revered and read extensively in others. This may be a product of his work with psychotic patients in a hospital setting, the split between psychoanalysts in New York (ego psychology) and Washington, D.C. (interpersonal psychoanalysis) that evolved in the 1930s, Sullivan's early dismissal of Freud's libido theory, or his recon-ceptualizing of Freud's zones of excitation (one-person situation) as zones of interaction (two-person situation) occurring in the interpersonal sphere. While Sullivan placed transference (parataxic distortion) and unconscious dynamics at the center of his theory, he was less enthusiastic about a cure that comes through interpretation, and more focused on the healing that comes from a relationship between an “expert and a patient.” A late adolescent breakdown and being gay marked Sullivan with a twin