Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures. With a Foreword by the Author and a Critical Appraisal of the Theory by Patrick Mullahy.

Sullivan, Harry Stack:

Published by Washington, D. C.: The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1947

About this Item

vii, 147 p. Der Einband ist leicht berieben, ansonsten ein sehr gutes und sauberes Exemplar ohne Anstreichungen. The binding is slightly rubbed, otherwise a very good and clean copy without markings. - (Excerpt:) Foreword HIS SERIES OF FIVE LECTURES, of which only the last two were expanded TH to reasonable proportions before publication, has had to serve as the available statement of my theoretical position while a four-year collaboration with the faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry was testing and refining the theory and developing some technical innovations in intensive psychotherapy which are implicit in it. This collaboration has included a series of 248 lecture-discussions at Chestnut Lodge, 66 seminars on clinical research, 57 teaching seminars, and almost 2,000 super- vising conferences concerned with treatment or the training of candidates for a career in intensive psychotherapy, in addition to eight courses of lectures given in the regular curriculum of instruction. Continuing close contact with the practical problem and theoretical preo?????- tions of twenty colleagues has done much to clarify and make communicable the views derived from 15 years of research with schizoid and obsessional people in a quarter century of practice. The here reprinted lectures fail of close correspondence with my current views in the following more significant respects. The theory of anxiety, its bearing on personality development, and its crucial importance in observing and influencing interpersonal relations, is not adequately stated. The developmental history of the self-dynamism is, therefore, left relatively unclear, its functional activity in selective inattention and in other peculiarities of interpersonal relations is not set forth, and the concept of dissociation comes to have undue importance as an explanatory principle. Mr. Mullahy's analysis will help to correct this inadequacy. These lectures are nowhere else as open to criticism as in their sketch of the developmental history of interpersonal relations. Here certainly one of Mr. Philip Sapir's many valuable criticisms of these lectures-"nothing can justify condensing two paragraphs into one sentence"-applies with peculiar force. Five lectures aver- aging two hours in length here 'cover' all psychiatry. In the current series of 34 School lectures, infancy as a phase in the human animal's becoming a person is not finished by the twelfth hour. It is in the structure of inferences about the first few years of life that one finds the key to formulating the otherwise baffling complexities of later stages of inter- personal relations which are brought into being by the combination of serially matured potentialities, experience, and the function of recall and foresight in the sundry interpersonal situations through which we live. In this connection, also, Mr. Mul- lahy's analysis adds something, but could scarcely communicate views which are but now at last becoming systematic. Psychiatry as it is the preoccupation of extant psychiatric specialists-is not science nor art but confusion []. Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 250.

Seller Inventory # 1255007

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry. The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures. With a Foreword by the Author and a Critical Appraisal of the Theory by Patrick Mullahy.
• Publisher: Washington, D. C.: The William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation
• Publication Date: 1947
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover.
• Edition: 3rd printing.
• Condition: Sehr gut
• Weight: 250 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Psychiatrie