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THE GREATNESS OF SULLIVAN'S PRECURSOR, FREUD, lay not only in unlocking major mysteries of the human imagination, but beyond that, in constructing a scientific system to explore their fullest ramifications. A scientific system is an effort to answer particular questions with the help of an orderly network of hypotheses, one that is both internally consistent and also in accord with known facts. When the formulation is useful, its hypotheses point to further relevant facts. My thesis is that Freud's system was hampered by his dedication to the inner imaginative realm to the neglect of those social contexts which nurture it. This led to a systematic warp in classical theory so that its hypotheses eventually pointed in misleading directions.
Many who followed Freud—including Adler, Jung, Kris, Horney, Fairbairn, Fromm—proposed correctives. Some of them shared ideas with Sullivan. It was his special contribution, however, to introduce a fresh and integrated theoretical system whose guidelines were particularly pertinent correctives for the overly narrow classical focus. Its perspective effectively achieved a balance between the subjective life and our communal existence in the everyday world by the operational statement of a field theory approach.
In the early phases of his career, Sullivan's outlook was fairly close to Freud's. Nor is that surprising considering that both were physicians who used their psychotherapy experience as a primary data source. Moreover, a quarter of a century of Freud's writings were available to Sullivan from the outset. In fact, Sullivan insisted that "behind all this phase of psychiatry [i.e. the interpersonal approach]