186 COHEN
Harry Stack Sullivan in the Washington School of Psychiatry. He was
a fellow consultant at the Naval Medical Center and, in addition, was
engaged in building a behavioral research program at the Walter Reed
Army Medical Center. The aforesaid studies were partly supported by
offering accredited courses to mental health workers and partly through
relationships established by the most senior teachers. The Washington
School of Psychiatry also established a journal, Psychiatry-Interpersonal
and Biological Processes, that has been published without interruption
since 1938, and is now under the direction of its fifth editor. The
opportunity to carry on such studies with the full-time participation of a
multidisciplinary staff was like a dream come true. I hoped to assemble
such a staff and believed it would work better if the heads of each major
division were of equal rank and received equal pay. I accepted Felix’s offer
and arranged to report on December 31, 1952.
It took me three months to disengage from my clinical obligations.
During that period I tried to find at least one senior clinician to join
me in operating the clinical program and I consulted widely concerning
ideas for the development of a meaningful research operation. My search
for an associate was completely unsuccessful. I called upon and/or wrote
to everyone I knew, to many I did not know but whose papers I regarded
as significant and stimulating, and to all those whose master’s and doc
toral degrees indicated interest in or commitment to research. All the
people I reached who were actively engaged in research were commit
ted to their current positions. In some instances, my invitation came too
late; they or their departments had received unsolicited funds from the
NIMH extramural program and they were fully engaged in studies already
under way.^7 Three exceptionally well-qualified women could not even
contemplate such a move since it involved a change for husbands and
children. Some otherwise qualified persons found the full-time research
requirement unacceptable; most preferred appointments that placed
primary emphasis on teaching and practice.^8 Some who believed the
supergrade salary was too low predicted I would continue to have diffi
culty assembling a research staff; I was the only one who ever came for
less than he was making. Working for the government was also not re
garded as necessarily a good thing because of the intrusion of Congress