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As the “relational” model has entered the mainstream of psychoanalytic discourse, there has been a renewed interest in the life and work of Harry Stack Sullivan. The late Stephen Mitchell, the intellectual leader of the relational model, trained at the White Institute, and openly embraced Sullivan's interpersonal theory as an essential cornerstone of relational psychoanalysis. Similarly, over the past two decades, the emerging field of gay studies became interested in Sullivan and explored the impact of his sexual orientation on his professional contributions. Although marginalized for decades within psychoanalysis as both a renegade and a homosexual, Sullivan's interpersonal theory and personal lifestyle can now be comfortably accepted by the analytic mainstream.
As such, Marco Conci's comprehensive volume on Sullivan's life and work admirably documents Sullivan's thinking and its incorporation into the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. Conci, an Italian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Germany, begins by outlining the early history of psychoanalysis in the United States as context for a biographical chapter on Sullivan's personal and professional life. This is followed by a chapter on Sullivan's contributions to the neo-Freudian movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The second half of the volume reviews Sullivan's ideas about schizophrenia and its treatment, his collaboration with leading social scientists, his clinical and developmental theories, and the incorporation of his interpersonal perspective into contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Conci's volume contains an exhaustive 36-page bibliography and hundreds of references to psychoanalysts and social scientists who have openly acknowledged Sullivan's contributions, as well as those whose ideas have ideas have paralleled Sullivan's perspectives. There are also many extensive and well-chosen quotations from Sullivan's writings; unfortunately, the lack of an index impairs the value of the volume as a re