SULLIVAN, HARRY STACK (1892-1949)

American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born on February, 21, 1892, in Norwich, New York, and died on January 14, 1949, in Paris.

The only son of a farming couple in rural upstate New York, Sullivan had a very lonely childhood and went through a deep psychological crisis upon entering Cornell University. He graduated from medical school in Chicago in 1917, but only in 1921 did he start working in psychiatry, under William Alanson White (1870-1937) at St. Elisabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. Between 1923 and 1930 he worked at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, Maryland, where he devised a very successful combination of milieu and individual therapy aimed at young schizophrenic patients. A good friend of Abraham Brill and a charter member of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society (1930), Sullivan progressively withdrew from Freudian psychoanalysis in order to concentrate on initiatives like the Washington School of Psychiatry (1936), the journal Psychiatry (1938), and on the development of his own interpersonal theory. In the early 1940s, on the invitation of Dexter Bullard, he worked as teacher and supervisor at Chestnut Lodge Hospital, where he influenced a whole series of colleagues, among them Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1889-1957).

In New York City in 1943, Sullivan, together with Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Janet and David Rioch founded the William Alanson White Institute, which became the major institution committed to the teaching and development of interpersonal psychoanalysis.

With the exception of Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (1940), six of his seven books available in English were published posthumously. The Psychiatric Interview is considered a classic and is still widely read.

Marco Conci

See also: Dismantling; Object relations theory; Schizophrenia; Second World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Perry, Helen Swick. (1982). Psychiatrist in America. The life of Harry Stack Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1940). Conceptions of modern psychiatry. Washington, DC: W.A. White Psychiatric Foundation.

——. (1953). Interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton.

——. (1954). The psychiatric interview. New York: W.W. Norton.

——. (1962). Schizophrenia as a human process. New York: W.W. Norton.