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OFTEN CRITICIZED FOR HIS CONVOLUTED language and psychiatric neologisms, Sullivan's participant observation and participant observer have become part of the language, filling a need in meaning and, though polysyllabic, seeming apt and comfortable on the tongue. The terms have penetrated the general vocabulary of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the social sciences. The core of thought unfolds as an axiom of elegant simplicity, with a wide range of implication and application.
In 1939, in his first lecture on Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, Harry Stack Sullivan referred to participant observation as, "the root premise of psychiatric methodology" (Sullivan, 1940), for the theory which had emerged at the beginning of his career as research psychiatrist. It arose out of thrashing discontent with how psychiatrists were functioning in regard to schizophrenic patients. His compassion for the weak and those all but outcast from the psychiatric world was joined to his search for meaning in their illness and for a foothold for therapy.
And in behalf of these goals, and expressive of his intellectual genius, he, from the beginning of his career, had an overriding interest in forging a scientific methodology for psychotherapy. He drew on ancillary resources via an interdisciplinary approach; another innovation in methodology. Throughout his life his thinking proceeded on two parallel tracks—the humanistic, and the scientific in service to the humanistic.
In a side comment in "The Oral Complex, presented in 1925 at age 32, Sullivan states that for the reconstruction which is needed for the recovery of the schizophrenic, hopefully the therapist can provide "the direct effect of another mind" to neutralize "emotional material of too primitive a nature for any conceptualization in the disordered mind." (Sullivan, 1925).
This description of ideal therapy contrasts to reprimands to therapists as appear in the group of papers which soon followed—and are now published as Schizophren