Sullivan and Psychoanalysis1

SULLIVAN CREDITED THREE GREAT therapists with significantly influencing his thinking in psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William A. White. From each, he acquired certain aspects of his approach to the problems of mental illness. From Freud, he obtained many fundamental orientations. Through Meyer, he was influenced in his thinking of mental illness as a dynamic pattern of behavior, as a way of reacting to life, and from White, he acquired some of the practical aspects of his therapeutic approach. Meyer and White directly influenced his life through personal contact and teaching. Sullivan never met Freud but he was an earnest student of his writings.

He entered the field of psychiatry around 1920. Unlike Freud, his first contacts were with psychotic patients. He only later became orders. For many years, he devoted his research to an attempt to apply psychoanalytic theory and technique to the therapy of the psychotic. Jung and Bleuler before him had found psychoanalytic theory useful in explaining some of the behavior and symbolization of the psychotic, but psychoanalysis as a method of therapy for the psychotic had hardly begun. In fact, it was considered dangerous and is still so considered to treat the psychotic by the classical Freudian methods. It was believed that classical analysis could precipitate psychosis in a borderline case and that therefore all attempts at psychoanalyzing psychotics should be avoided. At the same time, much of Freud's thinking was creeping into the orientation of psychiatrists in America. The importance of the experiences of early childhood in producing later difficulties was being stressed. Freud's concept of the unconscious, resistance, repression, and transference were beginning to be considered in