Sullivan as Pragmatic Visionary: Operationalist and OperRelationalist

Abstract

Harry Stack Sullivan knew about trauma. He knew a lot about trauma. And he knew about it personally. Too personally. He knew a lot about dissociation, too. But he never showed how or if he worked with it clinically. As an analytic candidate, I was frustrated—and finally gave up—trying to discover where in Sullivan's writing I might find something that would help me work clinically with dissociation. It wasn't there. What was there was his brilliant insight into what it was and how it—dissociation—manifested itself. But nowhere to be found was anything that helped me as a clinician. I have now come to understand why. And, in the process of discovery, I came to appreciate why the secret relationship between “Dr. Sullivan,” the genius, and the trauma survivor who always accompanied him—the hidden child I call “Harry”—provides a chance for me to finally offer my recognition of the extent to which his phrase “more simply human than otherwise” is an overdue tribute to their relationship and to the breathtaking conceptualization of what it means to be human, which revolutionized psychoanalytic thinking—a feat that was accomplished through this relationship, because of it, and in spite of it.

Keywords:

• interpersonal
• trauma
• dissociation
• Harry Stack Sullivan
• selfhood
• otherness

Notes

¹ I want to express my appreciation to Karen Marisak, president of the White Society, and the members of the White Society Colloquium Committee, Jill Bellinson, Ernesto Mujica, Bill Lubart, and Karen Gennaro, for giving me the opportunity to share some of my thoughts about why “I’m just wild about Harry,” and continue being equally wild about Dr. Sullivan.

² Sullivan's use of the word “discharge” is worth a comment because it is so disjunctive with his more consciously “operational” position. I think it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that Sullivan remained trapped in Freud's mind at least affectively—in Freud's idea of drives seeking discharge. That is to say, Sullivan's uncompromising dedication to operationalism can be offering us a “Freudian slip,” supporting the argument that, in Sartre's words, his own theory had not provided “a way out.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philip M. Bromberg

Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D., is training and supervising analyst, William Alanson White Institute; adjunct clinical professor, NYU Postdoctoral Program; emeritus co-editor-in-chief, Contemporary Psychoanalysis; editorial board member, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is the author of Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma and Dissociation (Routledge, 1998), Awakening the Dreamer (Routledge, 2006); and The Shadow of the Tsunami: and The Growth of the Relational Mind (Routledge, 2011).