Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading Conci’s biography of Harry Stack Sullivan entitled Sullivan Revisited – Life and Work: Harry Stack Sullivan’s Relevance for Contemporary Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. It’s a wonderful work that contextualizes the radical innovation of Sullivan’s contribution to interpersonal psychoanalysis. Sullivan is the grandfather of contemporary American psychoanalysis and Stephen Mitchell recognized his work as foundational to the contemporary movement. Sullivan began his work at Washington DC’s storied St. Elizabeths Hospital. He then went on to work at Sheppard Pratt Hospital, outside of Baltimore. While at Pratt, he began a therapeutic wing for young male psychotics who recently had psychotic breakdowns. He collaborated and influenced Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s work at Chestnut Lodge, a hospital located in the DC suburbs (in Rockville, MD).
What was interesting about Conci’s story about Sullivan’s theoretical and therapeutic innovations was the ways in which he re-worked psychoanalytic theory. Although he relied heavily on Freud’s notion of transference (which he re-named) and had an appreciation of unconscious processes, Sullivan was innovative in stressing the social nature of human beings. Sullivan (like many other early dissenters such as Fromm, Thompson, Fromm-Reichmann, etc) argued that Freud had overemphasized the sexual in human nature. Sullivan also collaborated with many social scientists, believing that the cultural and political background greatly informs the ways in which society understands mental illness.
Although I greatly appreciate Sullivan’s contribution to the theory and treatment of schizophrenia (along with the other notables in the interpersonalist tradition such as Fromm-Reichmann and Searles), I was astounded to find how quickly these psychoanalysts dropped sexuality from their theory. Continue reading “The Repression of Sexuality in Contemporary American Psychoanalysis”