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Many psychoanalysts today are unfamiliar with Harry Stack Sullivan's original papers and the one book published during his lifetime, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. Early in his career as a psychiatrist interested in both research in schizophrenia and its treatment, Sullivan was influenced by the psychoanalytic writers of the day. In the 1920's, he visited Europe and met some of them personally. His early writings utilize much classical analytic terminology, soon to be abandoned by him as he developed his own theory of interpersonal relations, which he continually modified but left incomplete. Recently many psychoanalysts, impressed by the depth and potentialities of interpersonal theory, have sought to explicate it and to bring it nearer to completion.
There had been, however, no carefully researched study of Sullivan's early life and the sources of his ideas prior to this one by Professor Chatelaine, a Maryland psychologist, teacher, clinician, and researcher into Sullivan's life and theory.
An aim of this book is to see how Sullivan came by his ideas — what factors, what life experiences and what people's ideas influenced and shaped his own thinking. It succeeds, in my opinion, in this aim.
Chapter 1 begins with Sullivan's ancestry, family, his relation to his parents, the effects of his growing up in a rural environment together with their influences on his life and concepts. Chapter 2 juxtaposes his theory of personality development with Chapter 1. Chapter 3 takes account of his omnivorous reading, and especially the ideas of William James, G. Stanley Hall and James Jackson Putnam. Chapter 4 presents the ideas of Charles H. Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Edward Sapir as possible intellectual sources for his theory of the self and of its development.
Medical school years, Sullivan's career in medicine, and the influence of W. A. White and Edward F. Kempf on his thinking as a psychiatric clinician are described in detail in Chapter 5. The following chapter is dev