Books in Brief: Psychiatrist of America

Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan, by Helen Swick Perry (Belknap/ Harvard, 462 pp., $20). Helen Swick Perry, editor of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s six posthumously published books, has now written the first full-length biography of Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal school of psychiatry and a key figure in the “neo-Freudian” movement in America in the early Thirties. An acid-tongued, hard-drinking homosexual with expensive tastes, Sullivan—a pioneer in the therapeutic treatment of schizophrenia who was, by his own admission, a former schizophrenic himself— crusaded tirelessly in support of the unpopular notion that psychiatrists had much to learn from the social sciences. As a result, Sullivan’s professional reputation in the field of psychiatry was more or less in eclipse long before his sudden death in 1949; Miss Perry’s excellent book, however, is likely to awaken a new generation of therapists to the thinker whose theory of interpersonal relations moved beyond Freud by taking into account the psychological effects of life in a democratic society. Miss Perry (who is not a psychiatrist) has basically avoided any detailed exposition of Sullivan’s theories, concentrating instead on the story of his tangled, erratic personal life, and Psychiatrist of America is particularly noteworthy for the author’s painstakingly thorough job of digging up the long-buried facts about Sullivan’s shanty-Irish upbringing in New York’s Chenango County. Drawing on her editorial familiarity with Sullivan’s lectures and essays, Miss Perry has carefully correlated hard biographical data with the countless veiled autobiographical allusions in Sullivan’s work to produce a convincing portrait of a famous, successful man who did his lifelong best to cover up the lasting scars of a difficult, often humiliating childhood and adolescence. On the debit side, Miss Perry’s clumsy, admiring prose is often irritatingly overblown; there is something ingenuous about her apparent inability to acknowledge the obvious fact of Sullivan’s homosexuality; and, owing to her restrictively biographical approach, Miss Perry gives the reader no real idea of how Sullivan’s work was —and is—viewed by those outside the interpersonal school. (A useful, if one-sided, corrective: Paul Robinson’s review of Psychiatrist of America in the March Psychology Today, a concise and hostile essay that recapitulates the Freudian view of Sullivan’s “interpersonal psychiatry.”) Nevertheless, this biography remains a major contribution to the history of post-Freudian psychiatry in the United States and an indispensable tool for the reader interested in learning more about the complex, tortured personality of Harry Stack Sullivan. A footnote: A good introduction to Sullivan’s thought is his transcribed lecture series The Psychiatric Interview, which is readily accessible to the informed layman.