HELEN SWICK PERRY SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED her thirty-year work as editor of Harry Stack Sullivan's (1892–1949) posthumous work with the publication, in 1982, of a splendid biography, in which Sullivan emerges as "a social scientist whose specialty was psychiatry" (p. 258).1 Greenberg and Mitchell speak of him as "one of the most influential, most ambitiously radical, and most frequently misread figures in the history of psychoanalytic ideas" (1983, p. 80). Also, in Italy, where the author of Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry has represented an important reference point for generations of colleagues, 2 it is time to reassess and appreciate