Reminiscences

I MET SULLIVAN AFTER I MET Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm. My connection with analysis began when I was on the internists’ staff at Mount Sinai and got more and more fascinated with the patients in internal medicine, always looking for whatever emotional disorders were accompanying their symptoms. So with that perspective, I spoke with Dr. Myer Maskin, an analyst and psychiatrist also connected with Mount Sinai, who told me of a group, with Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Erich Fromm, and that he had been in analysis with Clara Thompson. I didn’t even hear the name “Sullivan” for a couple of years.

As many of us did, and many of you will do, there was an attempt to evaluate the person, the analyst you’re going to work with, in whatever way you can. It so happened that Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Eric Fromm were giving courses at the New School for Social Research, so I went there a couple of times and got a feel of whom I would select. There was one occasion when both Karen Horney and Clara Thompson were presenting, as might be done here, and the way their dialogue went it was as though Karen Horney was the older sister snubbing her would-be competitive younger sister, and I could see that Clara was sort of settling into herself, so I decided that Clara would be my analyst.

Now incidently, these were the war years, the early forties—my arithmetic, numbers, and dates are not good, never have been! So when I began with Clara I hadn’t yet heard of Sullivan, and soon after I began, it happened that Karen Horney was trying to oust Eric Fromm, and just as she and Clara had left the very orthodox, standard psychoanalytic methods, here something was going on that had a similar quality. Clara was very indignant, and though I had only heard Eric at the New School, I happened to like his orientation to the world and society.

Clara told me that some of them were going to pull away in favor of