The Life and Legacy of Harry Stack Sullivan

Abstract

These welcome vintage fragments remind us again of the life and legacy of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949). Doctors Cooper and Guynn deserve our thanks for having made them available, both because of the centrality of the ideas in the fragments to Sullivan’s thought and because of our being left a sentimental memento of Sullivan. Further, they link us back to Hilde Bruch who recorded them. For me, their comments at the end of their article, expressing appreciation to the editors of Sullivan’s collected papers, apply equally to these two authors themselves for having laboriously reconstructed what still are difficult words to comprehend. Sullivan’s writing has only occasionally been considered lucid, straightforward, and easy to understand. On the other hand, as the authors mention, he was considered a charismatic teacher and superb clinician with a special gift for being in tune with patients. As always, for new generations who only vaguely know Sullivan, there is the question of taking the measure of a man who has passed. There are several structurally different ways of knowing anyone, which can be hierarchically arranged. These include having direct experience with the person, learning of the person from those who knew him well, seeing and/or hearing the person in recordings, reading what he has written, reading what others have written about him and, finally, being indirectly influenced by his thinking. There probably remain several handfuls of people who knew Sullivan directly, few of whom remain professionally active. Although he died just before I entered medical school, as a young resident I was fortunate (as were other Washington area trainees) in being trained by a number of people who were close to Sullivan. Many of my supervisors had been analyzed or supervised by Sullivan and I was strongly encouraged to model my treatment efforts after him. This especially applied to working with schizophrenic patients at Chestnut Lodge. Stories and clinical vignettes about him abounded and he was either held in great respect, or, among the psychoanalytically most orthodox, reviled. Unfortunately for today’s young professional’s, they are almost certain to know Sullivan only through the written word or from teachers who never met him. For some, these fragments may be their first exposure. I would like to focus my attention on two issues stemming from the paper: One is the operational usefulness of Sullivan’s ideas Psychiatry 69(2) Summer 2006 107