Roots and Branches

THE ROOTS OF A PERSON and of his ideas are to be found in his early formative personal experiences, and in the mediate culture to which he is later exposed. I can only note a few of the most salient biographical events which were major influences in Sullivan's development.

His life parallels that of the people he found a way to cure and, as Helen Swick Perry in her biography of Sullivan has shown, his life was the model for his theories. He grew up as the only surviving son of poor Irish Catholic parents, an outsider in a predominantly Protestant atmosphere. With a bitter mother, a detached father, and much parental turmoil, he was isolated in his family as well. Only one aunt seems to have had some understanding. He had to have had the early experience of feeling different in a shameful way. He knew loneliness well, and found solace as a brilliant physics student in high school, where he was befriended by the principal.

He went to Cornell, but failed in his first year. The following two years are completely unaccounted for, which has led to an undocumented belief that he might have had a breakdown and been hospitalized. In 1911, he was accepted at a third-rate medical school in Chicago. His medical training seems not to have been outstanding. However, he was exposed to the intellectual ferment and innovative thinking of the brilliant faculty at the University of Chicago at that time.

There was the sociologist George Herbert Mead, who had been a colleague of Charles Horton Cooley at the University of Michigan. Together they had done work on the development of the sense of self from the reflected appraisals of others, the so-called "mirror self", how one came to accept assigned roles. This was to have an important place in Sullivan's developmental theory.

There was the heritage of William James, the anti-dogmatic pragmatist, for whom truth was what worked; and John Dewey, espousing experience and education as a preparation for life.

At the beginning of the 20t