ABSTRACT
Sullivan’s many extraordinary ideas about the nature and conduct of psychotherapy was a crowning achievement. While Sullivan’s major work on psychotherapy, The Psychiatric Interview, is the most widely read and accessible of Sullivan’s books, the complexity and elegance of his thinking about psychotherapy is perhaps the least well understood of his many contributions to modern psychodynamic theory and practice. Starting with his successful psychotherapy of the previously “untreatable” disorders of schizophrenia and paranoid states (see Freud 1911b) and continuing with his treatment of the highly related obsessional states, Sullivan was a psychotherapist whose clinical brilliance was renowned. His extraordinary success with these clients gave credence to his conceptualizations about interpersonal relations and psychotherapy. He developed an approach to psychotherapy that grew directly out of his theories of personality and mental disorder, a treatment approach which challenged, and deviated markedly from, basic tenets of Freud’s (1904, 1912b, 1912c, 1913, 1914a, 1915c) psychoanalytic method. Historically, Sullivan’s psychotherapeutic innovations came at a time when “classical” psychoanalysts began to close ranks behind the Holy Grail of Freud’s technical suggestions, as Lipton (1977) pointed out, largely in response to the controversy over
Alexander’s (1961) concept of the corrective emotional experience, making the acceptance and integration of interpersonal concepts difficult.
