“More Simply Human…”: An Introduction

The articles in this special section of Contemporary Psychoanalysis have their origins in the 2012–2013 William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society's Colloquium Series, “More Simply Human …” Six of the nine speakers in the series—Philip M. Bromberg, Sandra Buechler, Marilyn Charles, Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, Richard B. Gartner, and John Kerr—adapted their original talks for this issue, and two others—Diane Ehrensaft and Spyros D. Orfanos—have written new articles that extend and complement the ideas they presented as part of the Colloquium. One Colloquium speaker, Nancy McWilliams, is not included in this issue; however, her talk from the Series is available online as an audio file, as is Dr. Bromberg's original presentation.

The idea for the Series came from the words of Harry Stack Sullivan, who had a formative—and ultimately, profound—influence on the development of the William Alanson White Institute and whose work has inspired many to undergo training at White. I read Sullivan for the first time in my first year of graduate school, and recall that, despite all of Sullivan's idiosyncrasies of language (or perhaps because of them), his words were often moving and inspirational. He passionately cared for and identified with the troubled patients he treated. Further, he wanted to expand the hearts and minds of his readers and students to enable them (that is, us) to better understand and truly be with patients, including those whom others might find alien or too challenging to work

with. He reminded us that we are all “much more simply human than otherwise.”

Sullivan's (1953) often-quoted phrase “everyone is much more simply human than otherwise” is at the heart of his ideas, as expressed in The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (p. 32), a posthumous collection of his writings. This “one-genus hypothesis or postulate” (p. 32) assumed that although people may differ in experience and stage of maturity, common humanity dominates, even in those of us with strikingly