Obituaries

While attending a meeting of the World Tensions Organization, Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, a charter member of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society, died in Paris on January the fourteenth, Dr. Sullivan had been in poor health since he had sustained a coronary attack in 1946 but had insisted on attending the meetings of the World Federation for Mental Health and related groups. While in Paris he sustained a fatal cerebral hemorrhage.

Dr. Sullivan was born February 11, 1892 in Norwich, New York, the only child of Irish Catholic parents. At an early age, he evinced an interest in the biological sciences which led to his studying medicine at the Chicago College of Medicine. Following his graduation in 1917 he was commissioned in the Medical Corps of the United States Army and served in the first World War. When the war was over he became attached as a psychiatrist to the United States Public Health Service and subsequently, under the aegis of the Veteran's Administration, to the St. Elizabeth's Hospital. In 1923 he joined the staff of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital and from 1925 to 1930 was Director of Therapeutic Research. It was during this period that he pursued his notable researches into the psychopathology and treatment of schizophrenia. He also initiated a project which aimed at correlating the efforts of leaders in the various social sciences in an investigation into the nature of personality and of interpersonal relations. He succeeded in organizing a “Colloquium on Personality” in which psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists participated. The philosophy underlying this approach to psychiatry continued to motivate him when, in 1937, he became associated with the Washington School of Psychiatry.

In teaching, in the inauguration of the journal PSYCHIATRY, and in the activities of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, he found ample scope for the exercise of his varied gifts.