The Perennial Sullivan (1892-1949)

Conci, M. Sullivan Rivisitato la sua rilevanza per la psichiatria la psicotera pia e la psicoanalisi. Massari Editore, 2000.

According to an old adage: nihil propheta in patria sua, man is not, or rarely, a prophet in his own land, prophets are often imported from elsewhere. Similarly one could say: there is no comprehensive biography of an important personality in his own land: for example, there has been no comprehensive biographer of Freud in Austria (it was Jones); there has been no definitive biography of Schreber in Germany. Until now there has been no definitive biography of Sullivan in America, where the only biography of note is Helen Swick Perry's 1982 book (1). Helen Swick devoted her life to Sullivan and it was her copious notes from Sullivan's lectures that became the bulk of Sullivan's published works. But it is where Swick's biography ends that the Italian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and historian Marco Conci begins. His magisterial work, modestly titled Sullivan Rivisitato, in fact, a comprehensive, exhaustive and definitive 671 page monograph, should properly be titled ‘the life and work of Harry Stack Sullivan’ and promptly translated into English.

This book is Conci's labor of love and magnum opus and it took ten years of research, including many trips to the United States, and five years of writing. He has attempted the ambitious task of recreating the historical background of the field in which Sullivan's life and work developed and providing a systematic articulation of Sullivan's work as presented in his books and other contributions. He admirably succeeds in both tasks, bringing to it the passion and the skills of a historian and the experiences and insights of a practicing psychotherapist and the culture of a European humanist.

Conci is guided by a dual set of principles and purposes in this exploration: to present the core of Sullivan's work and to convey a message to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, both currently in the throes of a serious ide