On Our Memory of Gay Sullivan: A Hidden Trajectory

ABSTRACT

This article examines psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's approach to the issue of homosexuality. Sullivan (1892–1949), well-known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, is believed to have accomplished a high recovery rate in his treatment of schizophrenia during the 1920s. Most of his patients, as well as Sullivan himself, were concerned about their “homosexual” orientations. He encouraged physical affection between male patients and male attendants, believing that it would free patients from their guilt for their “unconventional” sexuality. But he kept his compelling practice hidden, not bringing it into open discussion to confront the definition of homosexuality as “sickness.” This article traces the process in which the omission of the important aspect of Sullivan's practice began during his lifetime and continued in the scholarship since. In so doing, the article suggests a nuanced understanding of this important figure in the U.S. intellectual and cultural history of homosexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Harry Stack Sullivan
• interpersonal theory
• psychiatry
• homosexuality
• schizophrenia
• mental illness
• clinical work
• biography
• historiography.

I acknowledge Michael S. Allen for generously supplying Sullivan sources. I also acknowledge Mr. Stewart E. Perry for generously giving me access to Helen Swick Perry's Sullivan materials.

Notes

1. My discussion of Sullivan clinical practice is based on an analysis of the 1,696 clinical files at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland from June 1922 through April 1930, serial numbers from 4326 to 6377. The total 1,696 does not include 187 files that I could not locate at Sheppard-Pratt, 40 files whose contents were mostly missing, and 128 files whose contents were not accessible because they were transferred to newer files due to re-admission.

2. In his 1929 manuscript, for example, Sullivan classified homosexual men into “superior” and “inferior” groups: Whereas homosexuals who created “a stable relationship paralleling the enduring heterosexual couple” did not usually present social problems, those who sought same-sex love-objects only to secure “the attention … of as large a number of people as possible” were “dangerous” and often caused “criminologic [sic] problem.” In view of the fact that Sullivan was familiar with the urban gay culture—Philip Sapir (1989) remembered a night club to which Sullivan took him one night in New York City: “he shocked me by saying that she [a dancer] was he!”—it is likely that Sullivan was referring to fairies he encountered in commercial scenes of gay communities.

Moulton, R. (1987, December 15). File (interview). From the private archive of M. S. Allen.

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1926). Clinical record, file no. 5371. Baltimore, MD.

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1927). Clinical record, file no. 5373.

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1926). Clinical record, file no. 5427.

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1927). Clinical record, file no. 5538.

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1926). Clinical record, file no. 5428 (special interview).

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. (1927). Clinical record, file no. 5426 (special interview).

Sullivan, H. S. (1953). Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. New York:Norton. [Originally published in Psychiatry, 39(1940), 1–117].

Sullivan, H. S. (1956). Clinical studies in psychiatry, New York: Norton. [Edited lectures originally presented at Chestnut Lodge Hospital, Rockville, Maryland, 1942–1946]

Sullivan, H. S. (1962). Schizophrenia as a human process. New York: Norton. [Originally published in Schizophrenia [Dementia Praecox]: An Investigation of the Most Recent Advances, vol. 10, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1931]

Wake, N. (n.d.) Private practices: Gay science and the limits of American liberalism, 1920–1950. (Under contract with Rutgers University Press).