Psychoanalysis of America: A Review of “The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference” by Donnel Stern and Irwin Hirsch: A review of The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference, by Stern, Donnel and Hirsch, Irwin (2017), Routledge, New York, NY, 322 pages.

The history of psychoanalysis does not unfold in an orderly fashion and is subject, like all history, to the perspective and biases of the historian. To some, analytic history begins and ends with Freud. Others accept Freud as the beginning of a lineage that includes those that adhere to particular theoretical concepts and techniques, while consciously or unconsciously excluding other views.

If one were to read the psychoanalytic literature up to the 1960’s, one might believe that the field is somewhat monolithic; that concepts such as drive, analytic neutrality, Oedipal conflict and infantile sexuality were always and still are widely accepted; and that adherence to these rules of classical technique were the only way psychoanalysis could be defined. However, despite the Viennese origins of psychoanalysis, not so many years after Freud’s brilliant theory of mind, some psychiatric and analytic practitioners in the United States were developing ways of working that, while not always strictly seen as psychoanalysis at the time, would later as a whole be accepted as an analytic school in their own right (Levenson, 1992).

The most central of these American clinicians, Harry Stack Sullivan, a gifted psychiatrist often described as brilliant, mysterious, eccentric, irascible or obstreperous, was working at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt hospital in Maryland. Sullivan became known for his pioneering work on an all-male psychiatric unit, where he took some of the ideas contained in Freudian psychoanalysis and

modified them for therapy with schizophrenic patients. These modifications were essential; Sullivan did not find it useful, for example, to ask such patients to free associate, nor did he find concepts such as libido theory necessary (Thompson, 1978). He wasn’t against many Freudian ideas as much as he simply didn’t find them appropriate to the clinical challenges he encountered.

Sullivan was a bit of an intellectual magpie and a product of his time, borrowing freely from so