1940's Medicine and Health | Sullivan, Harry Stack 1892-1949

THE INTERPERSONAL" THEORY OF PSYCHIATRY

A "National Resource."

A federal government official called Harry Stack Sullivan "one of our important, largely unutilized national resources" when he served as a psychiatric consultant to the director of the Selective Service System during World War II. Sullivan himself believed his chief contribution to modern psychiatry was to define its meaning as "the scientific study of personality and of interpersonal relations."

The Importance of Social Factors.

Isolated as a boy on a New York farm, the young Sullivan was fascinated with people and their relationships. He toyed with the idea of becoming a physicist, but by the time he graduated from high school he had decided to study medicine and psychiatry. In order to pay his Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery debts, Sullivan began his medical career as an internist. His career in psychiatry officially began when the...