Sullivan's Influence on Sheppard Pratt*

After a brief summary of Sullivan's life prior to his arrival at Sheppard Pratt together with a glance at Kempf's influence from St. Elizabeths, we will focus on his experiences while at Sheppard covering a period of 7¹/₂ years: December 1922-June 1930. I will review some of the personal encounters with Sullivan as coworkers remember him. I shall also summarize his interviewing technique as revealed in sample clinical interviews at Sheppard. A list of his publications from that period of time include his Farewell Lectures, which were published many years later and entitled Personal Psychopathology. With all of this he managed an active participation in professional organizational activities, including his evolution toward the social sciences. It was an extremely productive period of his life, especially considering his prior limited training and his relatively young age of 30 at the time of his arrival at Sheppard.

Sullivan was born in Norwich, N.Y., in 1892, the only surviving child of a poor, rural Irish family. He lived a rather isolated life on the farm, with his mother's side of the family cultivating his interest in books. He was at the top of his high school class and won a scholarship to Cornell upon his graduation. Helen Perry (1982), in her biography, pointed out that he experienced what she termed the “Cornell Crisis” in his first year of college, from 1908 to 1909. Many details of Sullivan's life remain unclear, but he seems to have been involved in some kind of postal scam at the college at a time when his grades were miserable. He dropped out of sight for 2 years, 1909-1911. From various inferences, which we shall not go into here,