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Sulliyan began, as Helen Swick Perry points out, by studying the most distressed people in society, and then moved on to seek remedial solutions in the larger world. His observations helped him define needs for change, not only in psychiatry and psychiatric treatment, but also in national and international society.
Preceding him in regarding the role of society as of extreme importance was Edward J. Kempf, who published in 1921 a book entitled Psychopathology. Kempf uses the term “social esteem” in the same sense that Sullivan uses “self-esteem,” according to Helen Swick Perry (Sullivan, 1972, pp. xv-xix). Kempf regarded the personality as “a socialized unity.”
Although Sullivan, in his earliest book, Personal Psychopathology, written between 1929 and 1933, thought of himself as a psychopathologist, he later preferred to be known as a psychiatrist. Still later, he thought of psychiatry as belonging to social psychology, except for the fact that people tended to come for treatment to medical doctors. Still later his main concern was with world society. He died in 1949, while laboring on interdisciplinary conferences concerned with world problems.
To many psychotherapists, especially psychoanalysts, Sullivan's persistent efforts to effect changes in national and international society and in people generally were at best an interference with a therapist's therapeutic functions, and at worst an assumption that psychiatrists had powers and capabilities, for which there