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Although Personal Psychopathology was written forty years ago, it is surprisingly contemporary in its approach and subject matter. Sullivan was far ahead of his time in emphasizing and formulating the role of family interaction on the genesis of schizophrenia, and the concepts delineated in the first chapter, “The Totality of Organism and Situation,” anticipiate the perspectives of structuralism and general systems theory. Furthermore,
his overview of the defense mechanisms was written fifteen years before Anna Freud's book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense was published.
Sullivan was one of the first to recognize the significance of Piaget's work for our understanding of ontogenesis; in fact, the heart of this book is his comprehensive survey of the stages of personality development. Separate chapters on the “Juvenile Era,” “Preadolescence,” “Male Adolescence,” and “Notes on Female Adolescence” are included. Although he borrowed heavily from Freud and others, his ideas are mainly original and derived from his own clinical observations. The discussion of schizophrenic and obsessive manifestations shows penetrating clinical acumen. Unfortunately, the other neuroses and the character disorders receive less adequate attention.
Although Sullivan moves toward a consideration of our social institutions and their effects on mental illness and health, his clinical experiences dominate here. And although he accepted Freud's main clinical discoveries concerning psychic conflict, unconscious mental processes, transference, etc., he rejected many aspects of classical metapsychology. In fact, a serious defect of this work is Sullivan's failure to acknowledge the part played by infantile sexuality in child development and psychopathology. He does state, however, that
the free-associational technique invented by Freud is the only tool that we have for that comprehensive exploration of personality by which unguided intuition can be converted into rational insight.
One of his majo