In her biography of the innovative and influential psychotherapist Harry Stack Sullivan, Helen Swick Perry has provided a brief secondhand report of the circumstances under which Sullivan met James Inscoe, the youth who “came to stay” for the rest of Sullivan’s life and became known as his “adopted son.” Inscoe also wrote letters to a friend with an account of how they first became acquainted. The present article proposes that a case history of Sullivan’s contains hitherto unrecognized autobiographical elements that furnish a fuller picture of a domestic relationship founded on economic, emotional, and sexual adversity and pressures to appear successful. Perry is critiqued for the positive spin she puts on Sullivan’s life as she withheld significant information and clouds other inescapable conclusions in her otherwise painstakingly researched biography.