Part One:
The Historical and Scientific Context of Sullivanâs Life and Work
Biography usually fails to integrate its subject person with the significant others who facilitated and handicapped his durable achievements as a contributor to cultural history, and rarely indicates whence came his skills and limitations in the interpersonal relations which made his contribution effective⌠The phenomenon of Freud without its setting in the contemporary society of Vienna has been followed by the phenomena of Freudâs evangelists and Freudâs detractors, also without sensitivity to the nuances of cultural differences within the major context of the Western world⌠Any person is to a great degree a function of his past interpersonal history, the immediate present, and the well- or ill-foreseen neighboring future. Any people is an interlocking dynamic network of a great many contemporary persons, each with past, present, and neighboring future with considerable identities and similarities â roughly equaling the culture â and some significant differences (Sullivan, BR/1947, p. 216).
As Henri Ellenberger (1905-1993) has taught us in The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, a unique book both for the wealth of research it contains and for its methodology, the social, cultural, and historical contexts, including the so-called Zeitgeist, are naturally of fundamental significance, as are the personalities and the interpersonal relationships of the pioneers of dynamic psychiatry. For this reason, I begin this first chapter not by unfolding Sullivanâs life and the events that will condition his personality and work, but rather by describing the social atmosphere of the Progressive Era, paying particular attention to the emergence of modern American psychotherapy at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, I trace this aspect through the work and influence exerted by William James (1842-1910), James J. Putnam (1848-1918) and Adolf Meyer (1866-1950). Their influence is indeed essential for understanding â as we will do in the second chapter â both the context in which Freud held his famous Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis at Clark University (in Worcester, Massachusetts) in September 1909 and the reception and further development of his work in the âNew Worldâ, especially in terms of the specifically American phenomenon of the good reception of psychoanalysis within psychiatry. The third chapter traces Sullivanâs life, and together these first three chapters facilitate focusing more easily on Sullivanâs fellow travelers, the so-called neo-Freudians, whom I will address in the fourth chapter. At this point I will end chapter four by turning to the role Sullivan played in the 1930s and 1940s in the American psychiatric and psychoanalytic scene, as well as the legacy of his writings in their entirety, for the most part published posthumously.
The first step, then, is to attempt to understand how at the turn of the last century certain preconditions would develop in various fields of knowledge, and how the need for modern psychotherapy in American society as a whole came to be felt.
Chapter One: Psychotherapy Takes Hold in North America
Nathan Hale, author of the classic Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917, was the first to have put the question âWhere should a study of Freud in America begin?â (1971a, p. XIII). And thus, in contrast to other studies that preceded this one, Hale explored in quite an original way âthe professional, social, and moral order that determined the American reception of psychoanalysisâ (ibidem). Indeed, as Hale writes: âWithout an analysis of the pre-Freudian order, the nature of Freudâs influence could not be determinedâ (ibidem, p. XII). In other words, rather than adopt the route inaugurated by Ernest Jones in his Freud biography, which was later adopted also by Shakow and Rapaport (1964) and Burnham (1967), Hale takes on a rigorously historical approach analogous to Ellenbergerâs and provides us with two fundamental contributions. First, he clearly demonstrates the reasons for the continuity between psychoanalysis and the pre-existing American psychotherapy, admirably describing its genesis and development, which began within psychology, neurology, and psychiatry. Second, he elaborates the particular type of reception that Freudâs work encountered in North America, thereby decisively contributing to the field of studies that examines the reception of psychoanalysis in individual Western countries, culminating in 1989 with sociologist Edith Kurzweilâs The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective.
Thus Hale, within this conceptual framework, devotes ample space to the so-called Boston School. In 1832, Boston had welcomed Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) and had become a fertile field of dissemination for the phrenology developed by Spurzheimâs teacher Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828). Here, according to Hale, in the capital of New England and spanning the years from 1885 to 1909, modern American psychotherapy began and gradually took on a specific shape. This goes far in explaining why in 1906 the entry âpsychotherapyâ is included in the Index Medicus (Hall 1971a, p. 146) and why Morton Prince (1854-1929) founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. In May 1909, this same Prince, together with Putnam and Boris Sidis (1868-1923), in front of the participants at the American Medical Association (AMA) meeting in New Haven, summed up for the first time the actual state of psychotherapy (ibidem, p. 147), which Ernest Jones (1879-1958) then echoed in a pioneering contribution on psychoanalysis.
In other words, as Hale writes, âbetween 1904 and 1909 psychotherapy became a national medical and popular interest, and psychoanalysis became better known as one of several competing new methodsâ (ibidem, p. 138).
What exactly was this psychotherapy? Apart from the fact that hypnosis, suggestion, and re-education represented its three principle methods, the issue at hand was the emergence of the new psychopathology that in May 1910 would lead to the foundation of the American Psychopathological Association in Washington, D. C. (ibidem, p. 280). This ânew psychopathologyâ gradually developed as a response to the crisis of the âsomaticâ style, that is, the organicist approach in neuropsychiatry, which âresultedâ, as Hale explains, âfrom three converging streams of professional activity â medical observations of nervous and mental disorders; new experiments in hypnosis conducted by neurologists, and the research and theory of academic psychologistsâ (ibidem, p. 98).
And the Boston School? Actually, all three of these currents were palpable in New England and reinforced one another, thanks as well to the fortunate, or at least very productive, personal rapport that developed among those promoting these ideas. As Hale points out:
William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo MĂźnsterberg, professors of psychology and philosophy at Harvard, worked with Boston neurologists and psychiatrists. James Jackson Putnam, Harvardâs first professor of neurology, was one of five men whose âintellectual companionshipâ stimulated William Jamesâs Principles of Psychology, and the major achievements of the Boston school of psychopathologists came after the publication of Jamesâs Principles. James took his students to the psychiatric demonstrations by Adolf Meyer at the Worcester Insane Hospital, and the two men discussed psychiatry and scientific method (ibidem, p. 100).
This, in other words, is how we should examine Jamesâs, Putnamâs, and Meyerâs important roles in founding modern American psychotherapy, as well as their contribution to the reception of psychoanalysis and to Sullivanâs intellectual orientation.
1.1 William James and Functionalism
In speaking of psychotherapy, we are primarily reaching beyond the contrast between healthy and sick; on a psychological level we recognize only a quantitative deviation of processes in the suffering person familiar to us all. In other words, we develop the capacity to identify and empathize with the Other â the definition we are now accustomed to associating with psychoanalysis. For this reason, but based above all on his particular personal vicissitudes, James was a living example of this new mental attitude. Let me provide an overview of my argument. The concept of âconflictâ itself, which became the core of the psychoanalytical doctrinal system (see, for instance, Brenner 1976), not only represented (as we will see shortly) a state of mind that James thoroughly experienced in his own lifetime, but also an outlook that emerged systematically from his work. Indeed, to take this one step further, not only did James, as Hale writes, codify âfor a wide public Americaâs pre-Freudian views of the unconsciousâ (1971a, p. 109) but, as Shakow and Rapaport write, âin many respects [James] appears to have anticipated Freudâs ideasâ (1964, p. 38).
At the same time, writing as I do now from the standpoint of a Zeitgeist different from that of Shakow and Rapaport, and interested as I am in showing the relevance of Sullivanâs work in relation to the problems confronting us today, I can also say that dynamic psychology itself, which for decades tended to be assimilated sic et simpliciter to Freudâs works, had already found in Jamesâs writings a source and foundation which soon enabled the first systematic autonomous formulation of it. Indeed, as Boring writes, âabout 1910 Woodworth began to use the expression dynamic psychologyâ (1950, p. 722). Notably, this was within the scope of the functionalist perspective that Woodworth had learned from James and from Cattell (1860-1940), and which in 1917 led him to present his definition of this new disciplinary sphere in his volume Dy...