ABSTRACT
Harry Stack Sullivan was bom on February 21, 1892, in Norwich, New York. He was the only surviving child of a taciturn father, a farmer and skilled workman, and a mother who “never troubled to notice the characteristics of the child she had brought forth.... ‘Her son’ was so different from me that I felt she had no use for me, except as a clotheshorse on which to hang an elaborate pattern of illusions” (Sullivan, 1942). Partly because the Sullivans were the only Catholic family in a Protestant community, Harry had a lonely childhood. This helped him develop an unusual empathy for the intense isolation of the schizophrenic, together with a rather withdrawn personality of his own.
