Schizophrenia as a Human Process

by Harry Stack Sullivan, Helen Swick Perry (Introduction)

Amongst clinicians, Sullivan is probably best known for his early work with schizophrenics at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. Yet this fame has been largely legendary, since the only full record of this work is found scattered through various professional journals and monographs published more than twenty-five years ago and in an unpublished book written in the thirties, Personal Psychopathology. In this present book of selected papers, the author has tried to reconstruct this work by bringing together what he considers to be the most crucial of these papers.

Genres: Psychology

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

Reviews

[Jordyn Nimmer]

Harry Stack-Sullivan possesses a truly exceptional mind, though many of his opinions (expressed here) are both dated and inhumane. Evidently, he was a deeply flawed man with intense and obvious self-hatred. He offers some interesting points, though it is certainly wise to read his work with the aforementioned context in mind. I appreciate his reframing of schizophrenia as a dynamic, treatable, and deeply human condition (which is certainly not how society tended to portray it at the time).