ABSTRACT
No one has written comparative psychoanalysis more clearly than Stephen Mitchell. Nevertheless, Mitchell emphasizes the differences between Freud's and Sullivan's philosophical and general intellectual underpinnings. Sullivan's revolution began, Mitchell reminds us, with his work with schizophrenic people, who had been understood to be biologically diseased, their way of being in the world an arbitrary, meaningless jumble having no adaptive function. Influenced by the field theory of social psychology and by cultural anthropology, Mitchell tells us that Sullivan tried to transform psychoanalysis from the alleged objective and scientific study of the patient in vacuo to the study of the patient in the context of that individual's past and current field of others. Sullivan argued that mind is formed in a social context, contrasting his views with the Freudian tradition of the social as the product of more basic, inherent, and universal drive states.
