Frank J. Sulloway
From Philosopedia
Frank J. Sulloway (2 February 1947 - )
Sulloway, the son of Alvah Woodbury and Alison (Green) Sulloway, in 1969 received his A.B. degree summa cum laude, Harvard University, his A.M. in the History of Science in 1971, and his Ph. D. in the History of Science in 1978. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth, and University College in London.
Presently, Sulloway is a Visiting Scholar in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), he provides a radical reanalysis of the origins and validity of psychoanalysis and received the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society. In addition, Dr. Sulloway has written about the nature of scientific creativity.
In 1968, he organized a film expedition that retraced Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, following up by publishing extensively on the life and theories of Darwin. In 2006, he returned for the 10th expedition to the Galapagos in order to document ecological changes from old photographs that have occurred over the last century.
Dr. Sulloway also has employed evolutionary theory to understand how family dynamics affect personality development, including that of creative geniuses. He has a particular interest in the influence that birth order exerts on personality and behavior. In this connection, he is the author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996). Dr. Sulloway's researches on birth order and family dynamics have been featured on a variety of national television shows including "Nightline," the "Today Show," "Dateline NBC," the "Charlie Rose Show," and the Discovery Channel.
He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey), the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (University of California, Berkeley), the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California). In addition, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1997). He is a former MacArthur Fellow and has received the Randi Award of the Skeptics Society.
According to Paul Robinson's Freud and His Critics (1993), Sulloway, Adolf Grunbaum, and Jeffrey Masson are the three main anti-Freudians writing today.
Dr. Sulloway, who lives in Berkeley, California, has been described by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books as being, along with Jeffrey Masson and Adolf Grunbaum, one of the leading anti-Freudians. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has described Born to Rebel as "one of the most authoritative and important treatises in the hisotory of the social sciences." {Photo by John Hunter Mottern; WAS, 2 May 2006}
