ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has been struggling with the problems involved in addressing and understanding human relationality since the middle decades of the 20th century. The most important relational theorists were Harry Stack Sullivan, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, and Hans Loewald. Because mainstream psychoanalysis was so solidly occupied, both ideologically and politically, by Freudian-Kleinian drive theory, each of these theorists was consigned to marginality during the years in which their major contributions were introduced and, in some cases, for their lifetimes. Sullivan never even tried to become part of the psychoanalytic community, and grouped his contributions during the 1930s and 1940s under the rubric of “interpersonal psychiatry.” It was only later, through the efforts of Clara Thompson, that Sullivan’s interpersonal point of view was blended together with Erich Fromm’s “humanistic psychoanalysis” and Sandor Ferenczi’s revolutionary clinical innovations to form an interpersonal school of psychoanalysis. For many decades, interpersonal psychoanalysts were considered by the mainstream to be “not psychoanalysts” at all. It has only been in the last ten years or so in the United States, as the mainstream itself has turned in the direction of relationality and interaction, that the contributions of Sullivan and his intellectual descendents have come to be acknowledged.
