Naoko Wake

On Our Memory of Gay Sullivan: A Hidden Trajectory

ABSTRACT This article examines psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivans 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 Sullivans 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.

The full story by no means all told : Harry stack sullivan at sheppard-pratt, 1922-1930

Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) is well known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, but little is known about how he actually worked as a clinician with patients. This article examines a pivotal time in Sullivans career at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore from 1922 to 1930. Using clinical records as well as published writings, the article focuses on 2 crucial issues that are not fully addressed either in Sullivans published writings or in past studies of him: first, his treatment as a gay psychiatrist of patients who he believed had homosexual orientations; second, the intellectual and institutional paradigm in psychiatry that influenced his practice. Finally, this article addresses the circumstances surrounding Sullivans departure from Sheppard-Pratt, suggesting psychiatrys limited confrontation with the social stigmatization of homosexuality.

Living With Historical Uncertainty

This comment argues that Kathleen E. Meigs’s paper is historically and historiographically injudicious. By showing a range of historical contexts in which her sources such as books, letters, and memoirs were created, I first question the way Meigs uses Harry Stack Sullivan’s clinical observation as a proxy for his biography. Then I critique Meigs’s use of one person’s memoir referring to Sullivan’s youthful sexual experience as a basis for her argument that Sullivan had a similarly exploitative relationship with James Inscoe. In so doing, I suggest how keeping open multiple histories, not asserting a single interpretation, constitutes the best historical practice when available sources are limited and inconclusive.

Book review: Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Not long after Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was in print in January 1948, Lewis M. Terman, the Stanford psychologist famous for his definitive revision of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, found himself anxiously writing a critical review of the new best-seller. Terman submitted his lengthy piece to a leading journal, Psychological Bulletin, which accepted it after some trimming. That Terman’s anxiousness stemmed not only from his ‘gentlemanly’ scholarly disagreement with Kinsey, a colleague at Indiana University, Bloomington, and arguably the most important sex researcher of the 20 century, but also from the ‘ungentlemanly’ sexual politics in the history of psychology is the main argument of Gentlemen’s Disagreement. Taking a cue from Terman himself, who once described his review of Kinsey’s volume as the ‘most difficult’ task he had ever attempted (3), Hegarty aims to show how the clash between this pair of giants in the history of the human sciences – one of intelligence, the other of sexuality – reveals a hidden relationship between sex and intelligence. The result is a highly provocative look at the recent history of psychology, which carefully attends both to spoken and unspoken matters. Silence is as important as articulated ideas for Hegarty, and although his wide-ranging, suggestive exploration of the ‘sexual politics’ in psychological thought may elicit as many questions as it answers for some historians, his book is a distinctively incisive, fresh look at the subjectivity underlying what we call science. In the human sciences in the United States during the first half of the 20 century, sexuality and intelligence were indeed frequently brought up together. For instance, some psychologists and psychiatrists believed that excessive sex, especially