Harry Sullivan Stack was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is best known for his theory of interpersonal relations.
Background
Harry was born on February 21, 1892 in Norwich, Chenango County, New York, United States. He was the third and only surviving child of Timothy J. Sullivan and Ellen (Stack) Sullivan.
Both parents were the children of Irish immigrants who had left at the time of the potato famine; but there was a difference in class, with the mother coming from a more professional family. When Harry was three, his father gave up his job as a laborer in a farm machinery factory in Norwich and took over the management of his wife's family's farm near Smyrna, New York.
There Harry passed an isolated childhood, without brothers or sisters and largely cut off from the old Yankee, Protestant families that lived in the community. His loneliness allowed him to ponder on the importance of every human contact that he made. In a very real sense, his later theory contains his biography, once one has a key to the outstanding events of this period of his life.
Education
He attended the public school in the village of Smyrna, but because of his ethnic and religious differences, as well as his farm background, he never gained acceptance from the other pupils. He never went back to Cornell, and from that time (the spring of 1909) until he entered the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery in the fall of 1911, his whereabouts are not certainly known. He received his M. D. degree in 1917.
Career
Clarence Bellinger did become a crucial person in Sullivan's development and helped to determine his choice of a career. Both men became psychiatrists, although they differed in their clinical approach and their personal qualities.
Sullivan was for a time a first lieutenant in the Medical Corps during World War I. For a time also he practiced as an industrial surgeon in Chicago, and in the winter of 1916-1917, by his own report, he underwent seventy-five hours of psychoanalysis.
After the war Sullivan undertook an army assignment that brought him into contact with veterans who were suffering psychological trauma, and in 1922 he became a liaison officer for veterans' interests at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.
Here he came under the tutelage of William Alanson White, then superintendent of the hospital and an early advocate of the findings of Freud as a source of new hope for hospital patients. White encouraged Sullivan in his exploration of the schizophrenic process and seems to have been instrumental in facilitating his move to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital near Baltimore in 1923.
There Sullivan established a new type of ward for young male schizophrenics, essentially a one-sex, one-class society in which treatment was provided almost exclusively through hospital attendants trained and supervised by Sullivan. He assumed that the attendants often had suffered some of the same humiliations as the patients and that social recovery could be encouraged in this classless society.
Thus he tried to correct for the in-group, out-group humiliations he had himself experienced in the Smyrna school and used the attendants as trusted friends of the patients to create a therapeutic milieu.
Sullivan moved in 1930 to New York City to begin the private practice of psychiatry and to obtain further training from Thompson. His association with Sapir and with other social scientists helped deepen Sullivan's interest in how the social environment affects personality and mental disorder.
With Sapir and the political scientist Harold Lasswell, Sullivan planned the establishment of the Washington School of Psychiatry and the journal Psychiatry, both of which were realities by 1938. The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation was the fiscal agent for both school and journal, and Sullivan as teacher and editor became its guiding force.
The final decade of Sullivan's life was spent in Washington, where he moved in 1939, taking up residence in nearby Bethesda, Marylandd. Here he was increasingly engaged in quasigovernmental activities: as a consultant at the White House during World War II, as a consultant in setting up standards for psychiatric examination of draftees for the Selective Service System, and as a participant in the 1948 UNESCO study of tensions that cause wars.
In addition, he carried a heavy training and teaching load and made Psychiatry a preeminent journal in the field of interdisciplinary thinking.
He died in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, of a meningeal hemorrhage.
Views
He sought, first, to expand Freud's theory so as to include psychotic patients and to construct scientifically a milieu for the social recovery of patients showing schizophrenic processes. Because of the importance of the preadolescent experience for his own sanity - and he saw it as partially corrective for the ostracism he had experienced when he first went to school - he used this as a corrective model for male patients on his ward at Sheppard. He encouraged peer relationships of trust with persons of the same sex as a preliminary for social recovery. He went on to build a theoretic bridge from this group of hospital patients to his office patients in New York City, observing that their obsessional preoccupations were of a piece with the behavior of most people in this society and that such preoccupations could be necessary to avoid schizophrenic process. From there, he moved in the direction of tensions in the society in general, collaborating in the late 1930's with the Negro sociologists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier in studies of Negro youth in the rural South and in the Middle, or Border, States.
By his own account, he never achieved an enduring heterosexual adjustment, and he always viewed this as a loss. He saw homosexuality as a miscarriage of human living and denied that it was "innate. " Yet he viewed a homosexual solution as a makeshift preferable to life in a mental hospital. He defined the lack of normal early homosexual experience in the preadolescent period as a handicap for heterosexuality.
Quotations:
". .. the true or absolute individuality of a person is always beyond scientific grasp and invariably much less significant in the person's living than he has been taught to believe".
Personality
Pictures of Sullivan taken by Margaret Bourke-White (a former patient) show him as thin and elegant, his eyes intent in a sidelong way. When he removed his yellow-tinted glasses, his eyes were grey-green in color, according to the artist Loren MacIver; but they seemed dark and piercing with his glasses on, and they dominated his face. He tended not to look directly at the person to whom he was talking, a characteristic he explained as a result of his years of dealing with schizophrenic patients, though in fact it reflected also his shyness.
As a young man he grew a rather luxuriant moustache, and he retained a clipped-down version for the rest of his life. Though he was relatively tall (nearly five feet ten inches), most of his friends thought of him as slight and short. Yet as a critic - sharp and biting - or as a humorist par excellence, he had a commanding demeanor.
Quotes from others about the person
Social psychologist Gordon W. Allport: ". . Sullivan, perhaps more than any other person, labored to bring about the fusion of psychiatry and social science".