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Every life is a story. We say a person has a life story because we recognize that imagination, a kind of dreaming, is crucial to living. We must imagine ourselves in order to utilize, or to brook, the impact of circumstance and, most especially, influence. As much as we are pushed and prodded by material reality, we are shaped by dreams. Where a life
is concerned, what happened matters, but it is never the whole story. In the precincts of biography, inventory is no substitute for imagination. Epistemologically speaking, facts may bear little relation to the truth. The heart of biography is essentially paradoxical: a subject must be dreamed awake; he must be imagined to be real. An inventory of a life, then, must by definition incorporate invention, not in the sense of fabricating but in the sense of imagining, of wondering. How we organize and reconvene experience—how we imagine ourselves consequent to it—is how we become the persons we are, how we have a story to begin with.
In Sullivan Revisited: Life and Work, Marco Conci has given us an exhaustive, at times astonishing, compendium of information pertaining to Harry Stack Sullivan's formidable contributions to psychoanalysis and social psychiatry. The book is a richly detailed and contextualized survey of Sullivan's influence and influences. Much of this detail is important and adds to our understanding of Sullivan's thinking and the intellectual milieu in which it developed. Though Sullivan Revisited is not, strictly speaking, a biography, its reach includes a concern with the impact Sullivan's experience had on the development of his Interpersonal theory and technique as well as some effort to trace that effect. But although Conci has voluminously researched Sullivan, he has not captured him, because, I think, he has not fully imagined him. In particular, he has not allowed a depth appreciation of the crucial impact Sullivan's subjective experiences had on the establishment and elaboration of his most importan