I would like to thank Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere (see their excellent History Beyond Trauma: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent published in 2004 by Other Press--a book to be savored again and again) for resurrecting the osne-genus postulate of H.S. Sullivan and their reference to Sullivan’s schizophrenic illness. I have included the text from Helen Swick Perry, Sullivan’s biographer, below. Sullivan’s hypothesis fits well with recent genetic data (Francis Collins, director of the international Human Genome Project, pointed out that human beings share 99.9% of their genome with other human beings, i.e., at the DNA level we are all 99.9 percent identical. For a very in-depth discussion of the relationship between spirituality and contemporary science-physics and biology--and for a reasoned account of the plausibility of the existence of G_D, see The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins and published in 2006 by Free Press)

Sullivan’s one genus postulate:

“I now want to present what I used to call the one-genus hypothesis, or postulate. This hypothesis I word as follows: We shall assume that everyone is much more simply human than otherwise, and that anomalous interpersonal situations, insofar as they do not arise from differences in language or custom, are a function of differences in relative maturity of the persons concerned. In other words, the differences between any two instances of human personality--from the lowest grade imbecile to the highest-grade genius--are much less striking than the differences between the least-gifted human being and a member of the nearest other biological genus...I have become occupied with the science, not of individual differences, but of human identities, or parallels...I try to study the degrees and patterns of things which I assume to be ubiquitously human” [so much for mouse models of schizophrenia!] (Sullivan, 1953, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, pp.32-33).

Helen Swick Perry (1982) noted (see her Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan published by Harvard University Press):

“But in the spring of 1961, my interest in Sullivan and his beginnings abruptly changed. I was preparing a book of Sullivan’s writings for publication by the Foundation he had helped to establish; and I had titled the book Schizophrenia as a Human Process, with the approval of the appropriate committee. In my proposed introduction to the book, I mentioned the fact that Sullivan himself had been hospitalized with a schizophrenic break--a fact that seemed particularly germane to the contents of the book. To my amazement, the committee of Sullivan’s colleagues who passed on my work objected to this statement, doubting its reliability. One day, years before, when I had been driving Sullivan home after a meeting at St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeast Washington, he had told me that he was glad that no electric shock or lobotomy had been prevalent at the time he was growing up; he had been ill and hospitalized with schizophrenia, he said, and his case might have been treated so drastically that he would have ended up his life as a vegetable. Over the years, other people had commented to me about Sullivan’s early schizophrenic break, and I had presumed that it was established and reliable information” (p.3).

Brian Koehler PhD
Postdoctoral Faculty
New York University
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