Sullivan, Harry Stack

   (1892–1949)

   An advocate of psychotherapy for schizophrenic patients and of "interpersonal theory," Sullivan was born in Norwich, New York. He earned his M.D. from the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery in 1917, trained in psychoanalysis in 1917–1918, then spent the next few years either in military service or caring for veterans. Between 1923 and 1930, he was director of clinical research at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, where he ran a small unit designed to treat schizophrenic patients with a modified version of psychoanalysis. Between 1930 and 1939, he was in private practice in New York, thereafter in Washington, D.C., until his death.

   During his Washington years, Sullivan was influenced by Adolf Meyer’s belief that psychiatric symptoms represent a pathological reaction to personal circumstances. Sullivan is associated with "interpersonal" approaches to psychiatry, to schizophrenia in particular. As he explained in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1931, "Schizophrenia is meaningful only in an interpersonal context; its characteristics can only be established by a study of the interrelation of the schizophrenic with schizophrenic, less schizophrenic, and non-schizophrenic others" (p. 523). As for treatment, Sullivan said, "[The patients] must be activated by a well-integrated purpose of helping in the re-development or development de novo of self-esteem as an individual attractive to others" (p. 531).

   Sullivan emphasized a form of what was being called "milieu therapy" (see Psychotherapy: "milieu therapy" [from 1925]), an innovative approach to schizophrenia that was also being applied in other psychoanalytically oriented private clinics in those years, such as the Menninger Clinic, Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland (where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann [1889–1957] was the lead psychiatrist), and the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As Sullivan explained in his Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (1940), there were two forms of schizophrenia, one an organic brain disease leading to deterioration, the other "a disorder of living, not of the organic substrate." Several of his main publications appeared only posthumously, including The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953).