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In this series of lectures given under the joint auspices of the St. Elizabeth Hospital and the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation in October 1939, Harry Stack Sullivan gives an outline of the field of thought within which there are insights that illuminate some old and many future problems of the relations of man to man.
The first lecture, Conception of Modern Psychiatry, gives historical background. The second lecture called The Human Organism and Its Necessary Environment, epitomizes various concepts: man is not a creature of instinct (the view of Aristotle and of William McDougall); there are transcendental powers between or among which man may choose his allegiance (the medieval view rather sympathetic to Otto Rank); logic and its categorical opposite (Bacon and in a way Alfred Adler and Alfred Korzybski); the evolution of social intellect (Compte and some mental hygienists); racial fitness (de Gobineau and Hitler); the conflict of society and human instincts (Freud); racial unconscious (Jung).
As we survey the present, four significant conceptions emerge. For the general biologist, man is the most complexly integrated organism thus far evolved. For the psychobiologist, man is an individual organism the total function of which is mentally integrated life. For the social psychologist, man is the human animal transformed by social experience into a human being. For the psychiatrist as a student of interpersonal relations, man is the tangible substratum of human life.
Under the title Explanatory Conceptions, the author points out that the pursuit of satisfaction and the maintenance of security—the great motors of human behavior and thought—have physiological substrata that must be considered in any attempt at explaining states of mental disorder or maladjustment. Of special interest is the author's separation of dementia præcox from another syndrome: "It is primarily a disorder of living, not of the organic substitute. The person concerned becomes