Reflections

SULLIVAN IS MORE EASILY TAUGHT to college undergraduates than to candidates at psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training institutes. Can that sentence be true? It is, I believe, because of the identity-forming dimension of the training process, that candidates demand more from their study of Sullivan. The world of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has expanded enormously over the past several decades. New fads and cults arise with increasing

frequency; training institutes are proliferating at a sometimes alarming rate; new publications are so numerous that it is impossible to keep abreast of everything. Therefore, choice is necessary. The candidate chooses one institute out of many, and with that choice, an ideological framework, an approach. An important aspect of the first years of training concerns the attempt to justify the choice and to develop a sense of one's place in relation to the ideology of one's institute and to the larger psychoanalytic community beyond it. Whereas undergraduates are delighted to study Sullivan out of context, as a theory of psychopathology, for candidates, the context is crucial. They ask of themselves and their teachers questions such as: what is the relationship between Sullivan's work and ego psychology, object relations theory, Schafer's action language, etc. Is Sullivan writing about the same processes in a different language? What of Sullivan's work is compatible with other traditions and hence synthesizable? What is intrinsically different, and perhaps incompatible? What are the implications for these variations in theory for clinical work? One cannot teach Sullivan without addressing these questions, either explicitly or implicitly.

Sullivan must be taught in the context of his position within the history of psychoanalytic ideas, and his position