This book contains the fullest statement of Sullivan's developmental approach to psychiatry, showing in detail how Sullivan traced from early infancy to adulthood the formation of the person, opening the way to a deeper understanding of mental disorders in later life.

The chapters in this book, focusing on Sullivan's contributions to American social science, deal with the implications for psychiatry of the major social questions that emerged in the 1930's and 1940's. Some of the topics are propaganda and censorship; the illusion of personal individuality; and the meaning of anxiety.

Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1955 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

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scattered through various professional journals and monographs published more than twenty-five years ago and in an unpublished book written in the thirties, Personal Psychopathology.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.