Abstract

The literature on the life and work of American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan is used to provide a critique of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Derrida’s concept of archival violence relies on psychoanalysis both for its epistemology and for its exemplar of archival violence. The Sullivan literature shows how these positions become antagonistic when Derrida’s work is used to think about Freud’s critics. The published literature on Sullivan is described as a queer archive that has been strongly shaped by historical shifts in discourses about homosexuality, but that continues to stimulate and frustrate attempts to know the essential truth about Sullivan. Sullivan scholars have been quick to read his personality theory as autobiography, belittling the importance of friendship in Sullivan’s developmental theory, which differentiates it from the heteronormative Oedipal narrative. It is argued that Derrida’s mode of critique would entrench rather than unearth such heteronormative historiographical moves. Scholars are invited to put Sullivan’s biographies and published works to a broader range of uses in the human sciences.