0.3 Alfred adler and harry stack sullivan  (Page 27/37)

During his time at Sheppard Pratt, Sullivan became close friends with a young psychiatrist named Clara Thompson. They shared an interest in questioning Freud’s concepts of the feminine psyche and other challenges to orthodox psychoanalysis. As Sullivan became particularly interested in the work of Sandor Ferenczi (who accompanied Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on Freud’s only trip to America, but later split with Freud), he encourage Thompson to go to Budapest and be psychoanalyzed by Ferenczi. She did so, and upon her return she was Sullivan’s training analyst, and Sullivan was later admitted to the American Psychoanalytic Society. The two remained close throughout their lives, and supposedly agreed to marry one another, but both quickly broke off the engagement the very next morning (Alexander, 1990; Evans, 1996; Perry, 1982).

In 1930, Sullivan moved to New York City to establish a private practice and conduct research. However, he failed to make much money, incurred some family debts following his father’s death, and he filed for bankruptcy in 1932. The next few years were interesting, but unstable. He was the driving force behind the establishment of the William Alanson White Foundation in 1933, and he actively collaborated with two colleagues at Yale University (where they likely had an influence on Erik Erikson’s work). However, one of those colleagues died in 1939, and Sullivan immersed himself in a project studying Black adolescents in Tennessee and Mississippi. He then settled in Bethesda, Maryland, where he spent the rest of his career (Alexander, 1990; Evans, 1996; Perry, 1982).

The year 1939 marked the beginning of a highly productive period for Sullivan. Dexter Bullard, the director of a psychiatric hospital named Chestnut Lodge, provided Sullivan with steady consulting opportunities. This provided Sullivan financial security, and through Chestnut Lodge he met many influential psychiatrists in the Washington, DC area. William Alanson White had died in 1937, and Sullivan delivered a series of public lectures, which became the First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, and which were released as Sullivan’s only book published while he was still alive: Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (Sullivan, 1940). The White Foundation established the journal Psychiatry , and the Washington School of Psychiatry. Sullivan also encouraged the White Foundation to establish a second training program in New York City, and the core faculty included Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm. The second program is known today as the William Alanson White Institute. When, in 1941, Karen Horney was disqualified as a training analyst by the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Clara Thompson walked out of the meeting, and helped to establish a rival Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, with Horney as its dean. A series of political battles between opposing psychoanalytic societies followed, in many ways pitting followers of Freud against those whose interests and relationships were closer to Sullivan (Alexander, 1990; Evans, 1996; Perry, 1982).