Neil Franco E.

Abad

II-13

Harry Stack Sullivan was born in 1892 Norwich, New York. The only surviving child of Irish Catholic farmers. Who had to struggle to
provide the basic necessities for their son. He was a shy awkward boy and he had difficulty in getting along with other children.

Personality

Sullivan defined the personality as the characteristic ways in which an individual deal with other people. Interpersonal relations
constitute the basis of personality. The term personality was only a hypothesis for Sullivan. It was merely an imaginary construct that is
used to explain and predict certain behaviors. We can see, hear, and feel an individual is relating to other people in certain ways such as
in passive or dominant fashion.

Anxiety and Unawareness

Sullivan conceived of anxiety as any painful feeling or emotion that may arise from organic needs or social security. It can be described
and observed through a subjective description of how one feels or an objective notation of physical appearance and reactions and
through physiological changes that are indicative of anxiety.

Sullivan appreciated that an individual may unconscious or unaware of some of his or her motives and behaviors if we are unware of our
interpersonal relationships, we do not experience them and cannot learn from them.

Security Operations – is an interpersonal device that a person uses to minimize anxiety. These are healthy if they increase their security
without jeopardizing our competence in interpersonal relations. They are unhealthy if they provide security at the expense of
developing more effective interpersonal skills.

Sullivan’s notion of security operations parallels Freud’s concept of defense mechanism.

Dynamisms – a pattern of energy transformation that characterizes an individual’s interpersonal relations. Dynamisms result from
experiences with other people. Sullivan focused on the transformation of energy as it flows between people in relationships.

The child who is afraid of strangers illustrates the dynamism of fear. The young male who during adolescence seeks sexual relations with
young women is experiencing the dynamism of lust.

3 Phases

Good-me Self – refers to the content of awareness when one is thoroughly satisfied with one’s self. It is based on experiences that were
rewarding and is characterized by a lack of anxiety.

Bad-me Self – is the self-awareness that is organized around experiences to be avoided because they are anxiety producing.

Not-me Self – aspects of the self that are regarded as dreadful and that cannot be permitted conscious awareness and
acknowledgement.

Personification – is a group of feelings, attitudes, and thoughts that have arisen out of one’s interpersonal experiences. Personification
can relate to the self or to the other persons.

Stages of Development

Stage Focus
Infancy Interpersonal that crystalize around the feeding
situation
Childhood Development of healthy relationship with one’s
parents
Juvenile Era The need to relate to playmates and same sex peers
Pre-adolescence A chum relationship, the beginning of intimate
reciprocal relationships. Could entail overt
homosexual genital activity.
Early Adolescence The development of a lust dynamism and a stable
heterosexual pattern of sexual satisfaction
Late Adolescence Integration and stabilization of culturally appropriate
adult social, vocational, and economic behavior.
Cognitive Processes – it is by which we experience the world and relate to others in their course of personality development.

Prototaxic Experience – which is characteristic of infant and there is no distinction between the self and external world. The child
perceives sensations, thoughts, and feelings but does not draw conclusion.

Parataxic Experience – perceives casual relations between events that happened together. It involves making generalizations about
experience on the basis of proximity.

Syntaxic Experience – which uses symbols and relies on consensual validation or agreement among persons. It relies upon symbols
whose meaning is shared by other people in one’s culture such as the use of language.

Essence

Anxiety is a central concept in this theory, it is a painful feeling or emotion that may arise from organic or social insecurity. It has an
interpersonal origin.
 Matrix

Dynamisms

Anxiety and
Unawareness

Personifications

Stages of
Personality Developments

Security Operations

Cognitive Processes