THE FUSION OF PSYCHIATRY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Along with Horney and Fromm, Sullivan was one of the original neo-Freudians. Like them he rejected- in part, anyway- the dark orthodoxy of the Ocdipal situation, the unconscious and so forth, and concentrated on the daylight world. People behave the way they do largely because other people are behaving the way they do, both reacting then to a particular cultural set-up rather than to biological drives. Thus Sullivan's study of interpersonal relations and socially-oriented dynamisms, and thus the clinical demonstration, the pursuit of inner satisfactions revolving on outer securities. Sullivan published little and what he did publish was generally linguistically tortuous. This volume- previously uncollected papers, articles and reports from the New Deal era to the aftermath of WWII - discusses problems still very current on the American scene and discusses them in a surprisingly straightforward manner. Here we see his pioneer efforts regarding the nature of racism (the Northern ""Negro struggles with rage while the Southern Negro suffers from fear""), propaganda and censorship, morale and opinion leadership, battle neuroses and post-war tensions, as well as the more set-pieces treating of disciplinary concepts, of anxiety, of the ""myth"" of the individual, of the importance of operationalism (the psychiatrist must ""make public sense instead of private marvel""). The concluding specimen, a speech delivered at a UNESCO conference shortly before his death, brilliantly anatomizes the roots of international misunderstanding and fear.