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Few psychiatrists can lay claim to the charisma of Harry Stack Sullivan. The author traces the salient features of the life and story of this famous and enigmatic man, who has influenced American psychiatry in so many ways.
-Dilip Ramchandani, M.D.
History Notes Editor
By Lucy D. Ozarin, M.D.
Fifty years after his death, Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., remains an enigmatic personality on the American psychiatric scene despite being the subject of many biographies, books, monographs, and oral histories.
He was born in rural south-central New York to a withdrawn father and an unhappy mother. Sullivan was a lonely child, a Catholic in a Protestant community. His only companion was a 5-year-old boy in a neighboring farm who himself became a psychiatrist in later life. To what degree this influenced Sullivan's career choice is unknown.
Sullivan completed high school and received a scholarship to Cornell University but dropped out in his second semester in 1909 because of failing grades. Rumors abound that he had a schizophrenic illness, but no records of a hospitalization have ever been found.
In 1911 Sullivan enrolled as a student at the unaccredited Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery and received a medical degree in 1916. He served as a physician for various industrial and insurance companies, the National Guard, the Army, and eventually the federal government. His first contact with psychiatry occurred when he was a liaison officer between the Veterans Administration and St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.
He began to talk to patients at St. Elizabeths and attended lectures. Dr. William A. White, a major figure in American psychiatry and an psychoanalyst, helped him secure a job at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, which proved to be a turning point in Sullivan's career.
He established a reputation for successfully treating young men with schizophrenia. He began to write and publish. By 1926 Sullivan had faculty appointments, was director of research at his hospital, was active in many psychiatric societies, and became associate editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry. At this time, he met Dr. Edward Sapir, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Harold Lasswell, a political scientist, who taught there as well. Sullivan was influenced by these men and others in his conviction about the importance of social sciences for psychiatry.
In 1931 Sullivan moved to New York, developed a large and lucrative outpatient practice, and received 300 hours of personal analysis from Dr. Clara Thompson, who herself had been an analysand of Ferenczi. Sullivan became part of the psychoanalytic movement but was increasingly disenchanted with Freudian theory. Moving with the dissidents, he helped to found the William A. White Foundation in 1936, the Washington School of Psychiatry, and the journal Psychiatry. At this time, his ideas embodying the influence of social sciences in psychiatry also began to take shape and were the basis for his formulations of interpersonal theory.
Having returned to Washington in 1939, Sullivan now devoted himself to training, writing, and private practice. When World War II ended, he thought his viewpoints on interpersonal relations could contribute to avoiding future conflicts between nations and the risk of war. In collaboration with Dr. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian psychiatrist and later director of the World Health Organization, he put these ideas to practice. Thus was born the World Federation for Mental Health.
Sullivan died, possibly of heart attack and a stroke, in a hotel room in Paris in 1949 while attending a conference related to his international work. He was 57.
Of Sullivan the person, some information is fact, some is anecdotal, some is rumor. That he was homosexual is widely suspected; that he was improvident with money is fact (he borrowed from colleagues and declared bankruptcy twice in the 1930's); that he was loose with the truth at times, especially during his early years, is speculated.
One may wonder about the source of motivation in Sullivan, a lonely child, a college failure, and a graduate of a diploma-mill medical school who had a lackluster medical career until chance contact with psychiatry occurred at age 30. Yet for the next three decades, Sullivan achieved national and international status in the psychiatric community. As Dexter Bullard commented in his oral history, "Sullivan was loved and hated with equal intensity. . . . [N]o one knew all of Sullivan. . . . [H]e was the closest thing to a genius I've ever seen. . . . [H]is work will outlast Adolph Meyer."