Harry Stack Sullivan 1892-1949, American psychiatrist, b. Norwich, N.Y., M.D. Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery, 1917. He was, along with his teacher William Alanson White, responsible for the extension of Freudian psychoanalysis to the treatment of patients with severe mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia. In his work on the subject of schizophrenics, Sullivan argued that such individuals were not incurable, and that cultural forces were largely responsible for their condition. In his dual role as head of the William Alanson White Foundation (1934-43) and of the Washington School of Psychiatry (1936-47), he had the collaboration of like-minded psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists in bringing his views to public and professional attention. His writings include Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (1947, repr. 1966); Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (ed. by H. S. Perry and M. L. Gawel, 1953, repr. 1968); Schizophrenia as a Human Process (1962, repr. 1974).

Bibliography: See biography by H. Perry (1982, repr. 1987); study by P. Mullahy (1970).

Harry Stack Sullivan

The American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) based his approach to mental illness primarily upon interpersonal theory.

Harry Stack Sullivan, born on Feb. 21, 1892, in the farming community of Norwich, N.Y., was the only surviving child of a poor Irish farmer. His childhood was apparently a lonely one, his friends and playmates consisting largely of the farm animals. His mother, who was sickly, was unhappy with the family's poor situation, and is reported to have shown her son little affection. These personal experiences seem to have had a marked effect on Sullivan's professional views in later life.

Sullivan took his medical degree in 1917 at the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery. In 1919 he began working at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., with William Alanson White, an early American psychoanalyst. Clinical research at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital occupied a portion of Sullivan's life, as did an appointment in the University of Maryland's School of Medicine. In 1936 he helped establish the Washington School of Psychiatry. In later life he served as professor and head of the department of psychiatry in Georgetown University Medical School, president of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, editor of Psychiatry, and chairman of the Council of Fellows of the Washington School of Psychiatry.

Sullivan's approach to psychiatry emphasized the social factors which contribute to the development of personality. He differed from Sigmund Freud in viewing the significance of the early parent-child relationship as being not primarily sexual but, rather, as an early quest for security by the child. It is here that one can see Sullivan's own childhood experiences determining the direction of his professional thought.

Characteristic of Sullivan's work was his attempt to integrate multiple disciplines and ideas borrowed from those disciplines. His interests ranged from evolution to communication, from learning to social organization. He emphasized interpersonal relations. He objected to studying mental illness in people isolated from society. Personality characteristics were, he felt, determined by the relationship between each individual and the people in his environment. He avoided thinking of personality as a unique, individual, fixed unchanging entity and preferred to define it as a manifestation of the interaction between people.

On Jan. 14, 1949, while returning from a meeting of the executive board of the World Federation for Mental Health, Sullivan died in Paris. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Further Reading

Two quite different works relating to Sullivan's contributions to psychiatric thought and to his place in its history are Patrick Mullahy, ed., The Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan: A Symposium on Interpersonal Theory in Psychiatry and Social Science (1952), and Martin Birnbach, Neo-Freudian Social Philosophy (1961). Sullivan and his work are discussed in Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970).

Additional Sources

Chapman, A. H. (Arthur Harry), Harry Stack Sullivan: his life and his work, New York: Putnam, 1976.

Chatelaine, Kenneth L., Good me, bad me, not me: Harry Stack Sullivan: an introduction to his thought, Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1992.

Chatelaine, Kenneth L., Harry Stack Sullivan, the formative years, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981.

Perry, Helen Swick, Psychiatrist of America, the life of Harry Stack Sullivan, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982. □

SULLIVAN, HARRY STACK 1892-1949

The interpersonal" theory of psychiatry

A "National Resource."

A federal government official called Harry Stack Sullivan "one of our important, largely unutilized national resources" when he served as a psychiatric consultant to the director of the Selective Service System during World War II. Sullivan himself believed his chief contribution to modern psychiatry was to define its meaning as "the scientific study of personality and of interpersonal relations."

The Importance of Social Factors

Isolated as a boy on a New York farm, the young Sullivan was fascinated with people and their relationships. He toyed with the idea of becoming a physicist, but by the time he graduated from high school he had decided to study medicine and psychiatry. In order to pay his Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery debts, Sullivan began his medical career as an internist. His career in psychiatry officially began when the federal government hired him as U.S. veterans' liaison officer at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., where he made his reputation as a humane and creative therapist with schizophrenic patients. From there he went to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, where his studies on schizophrenic patients convinced him of the importance of social factors in explaining mental health or illness. He began to focus his attention on the social sciences and encouraged the American Psychiatric Association to set up a standing committee on the relations of psychiatry and the social sciences. During World War II Sullivan applied his psychiatric theories to the Selective Service System and was medical adviser to the War Department general staff.

Treating Schizophrenia

Sullivan believed personality and personality disturbance were a function of interpersonal relations. Unlike Freud, he insisted later periods, especially adolescence, were as critical as the first five years for personality development. Since he believed mental illnesses were a "problem-solving" reaction to an unbearable situation, Sullivan insisted schizophrenia, no matter how bizarre, could be treated. He is recognized as the psychiatrist who removed schizophrenia from the class of incurable disorders, unlike Freud, who believed schizophrenia was untreatable because his "talking therapy" was useless with people who could not communicate rationally. Sullivan's contributions to the technique of clinical interviewing pioneered efforts to understand and help the severely disturbed. Sullivan was also the first to suggest that the therapist could be a greater participant in helping the patient cope with his behavior, instead of merely striving to understand it. His orientation deemphasized biology and sexuality in explaining human behavior, and his new theory of the importance of interpersonal relations revolutionized psychiatry by broadening its relevance to social problems and helped to bring it into the modern age.

Source:

Helen Swick Perry, Psychiatrist of America, the Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982).