Where the Fiercest Attention Becomes Routine: A Discussion of Harry Stack Sullivan and Feminist Psychoanalysis*

Imagine a bespectacled Harry Stack Sullivan in a depression-era bowtie, listening with the intensity I always imagine he listened with, sitting on a panel with contemporary feminist psychoanalysts—Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin, for instance. Raised by his grandmother, mother, and aunt, away from his emotionally remote father and the “manly” outdoor farm chores, Harry would sit around the farmhouse table with the women and talk about books and ideas (Perry, 1982). Sullivan probably worried about being called a sissy because he didn't take on the male role at home or at school. I imagine him welcoming his feminist colleagues and their more prismatic notions of gender and relatedness as light through a gray rural sky. As those who knew him professionally tell us (; White, 1978), he was capable not only of the scientific aloofness that so often characterized men of his professional and societal rank, but also of a highly attuned tenderness. Such was Sullivan's demeanor toward those patients most fragile and disenfranchised, those likely to expect dismissal to the proverbial bottom of the barrel (White, 1978). Many of his friends were women. He encouraged one of them, Clara Thompson, to pursue a training analysis with Sandor Ferenczi, after hearing Ferenczi speak of the importance of a more mutual tie between patient and therapist.