Harry Stack Sullivan

1892-1948

SULLIVAN INTERPERSONAL
THEORY

Respond Efficiently to Different Behavior

2

FREUD SULLIVAN

Personality governed by un- Personality governed by

modifiable biological factors interpersonal interactions
 Sullivan’s CORE IDEAS

First American to construct a Comprehensive Personality

Theory
Emphasizes childhood friendships in the formation of
personality
- Chumship, intimacy, & Security
Personality is shaped from our relationships with others

Personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations

in which the person lives
- i.e., Personality cannot be separated from our
social worlds
 Sullivan’s Background

 Sullivan was born in 1892 in Norwich, New York

 the son of a poor working man and farmer
 He grew up isolated, and was a loner
 Obtained his MD at 25 from a small
Chicago medical school, then was a
psychiatrist at a mental hospital in Maryland
 Viewed as a ―clinical wizard‖ in the
treatment of schizophrenia
 Never Married
 He moved from obscurity to fame in 8 years
 Background
7

 Born on an isolated farm in Near Norwich, NY 21 Feb

1892
 Irish-Catholic immigrants of modest financial means
 Mother was 39yrs when he was born
 Two older sons had both died before 1yr age

 Extreme discomfort and awkwardness in social

relationships
 Background
 Exacerbated by own homosexuality (Perry, 1982)
 Viewed homosexuality as pathological and impediment to full-
adaptive functioning and integration to adult society

 Suffered schizophrenic breakdown & hospitalised (Perry

1972, 1982)
 Acquired unique insight into origins of problems + overcoming
of difficulties
 First to initiate therapeutic communities

 Awareness of own deficits

 Attribution to restricted exposure to interpersonal learning
experiences during growing years
 Structure of Personality
9

 Personality
 Purely hypothetical entity
 Cannot be observed or studied apart from interpersonal
situations
 Other person need not be present – can be illusory or non-
existent figure
 Perceiving, remembering, thinking, imaging and all other
psychological processes are interpersonal in character.
 “Psychiatry is the study of phenomena that occur in interpersonal
situations, in configurations of two or more people all but one of
whom may be more or less completely illusionary” 1964, pg 33
 Unit of study is interpersonal situation and not the person
Structure of Personality
 Though hypothetical, personality is at the
dynamic centre of various processes that occur
in a series of interpersonal fields
Dynamisms
Dynamism of Self / Self-system
Personifications
Cognitive processes
Dynamics of Personality - Tensions

 Organism is a tension system varying between

absolute relaxation (euphoria) ↔ absolute tension (extreme
terror)
 Two main sources of tension are
1. Needs of the Organism
a) Physiochemical Requirements – food, water
b) Emotional Needs – human contact, expressing talent / ability
2. Anxiety – real / imaginary threats to security

 Tensions can be regarded as

 Needs for particular
 energy transformations which will Dissipate tension
 With accompanying change of mental state c/a satisfaction
Tensions
 potentially for action or actions themselves
(i.e., energy transformations) that may not be
experienced in awareness.
 Needs
 Tensions brought on by a biological imbalance between
the person and the physiochemical environment, both
inside and outside the organism.
 GENERAL
 The most basic interpersonal need is that of tenderness.
 Can be physiological or interpersonal
 ZONAL (oral, genital, manual)
 Anxiety

anxiety is disjunctive and calls for no consistent actions for its relief.
 Anxiety is the chief disruptive force
blocking our development of good
interpersonal relations.
Energy Transformation

Tensions that are transformed into actions, either overt or covert.

 Needs to represent an imbalance between biology and the environment that
signal the individual to engage in action.
Dynamics of Personality - Tensions

provokes
NEED Creates TENSION

Energy
SATISFACTION Transforming which
dissipate Tension
 DYNAMISM
 Typical behavior patterns DYNAMISMS
that characterize a person
throughout a lifetime.
 The ways in which an
individual typically meets
his or her needs or deals
with anxiety
Disjunctive/malevolent
– negative interpersonal
behavior
Conjunctive/ intimacy
– positive interpersonal
behavior
Isolating/ Lust
– unrelated to interpersonal
 wishing evil to others.

 Disjunctive destructive patterns of

behavior related to malevolence.
 Feeling of living among one‘s enemies

 Arises around age 2 or 3

 Caused by parental neglect or rejection

 Isolating patterns of behavior that are
unrelated to interpersonal behavior (e.g.,
lust).
 Self-centered needs

 Based largely on sexual

gratification
 Conjunctive beneficial patterns of behavior
such as intimacy and the self- system.
 Grows out of early needs for
tenderness
 Emerges in the “chumship”

 Prepubescent best friend relationship

with a peer of equal status
 Decreases anxiety and loneliness
 Self-System

- The most complex and the inclusive of all dynamisms.

- A consistent patterns of behaviors that maintains people
interpersonal security by protecting them against anxiety.
-Not open to change
- Helps to reduce anxiety.

- Security Operations-

1. dissociation- includes those impulses, desires, and needs that a person

refuses to allow into awareness.
2. selective inattention- is a refusal to see those things that we do not
wish to see that are not consistent to our self-system.
  Personifications help maintain emotional
 Representations of self and other
equilibrium and reduce anxiety
 Separation of the good vs. bad
 Mental images that we acquire
during development to help us Self Personifications
understand ourselves and the world

The Bad Me
 A cognitive approach to
understanding personality. The Good Me

The Not Me

PERSONIFICATIONS
 grows from experiences of punishment and
disapproval
 Represents those aspects of the self that are
considered negative and hidden from others and
possibly the self.

 Anxiety results from recognition of the bad me

 Recalling an embarrassing moment

 Guilt about a past action
 results from experiences with reward and
approval
 Experiences associated with tenderness
and intimacy
 Everything we like about ourselves
 The part of us we share with others and prefer to
focus on because it produces no anxiety

 Persona ?
 anxiety provoking experiences that invoke
security operations may become dissociated
from self to form the not-me.
 Security operations = Sullivan‘s concept of
defense mechanisms
 Experiences that are denied
 Experiences that are kept out of awareness and
repressed
 Acknowledging not-me experiences creates high
anxiety/ negative emotion.
Development of
Mental theory
 Cognitive
 Social
 Cognitive Development
Prototaxic Mode Parataxic Mode Syntactic Mode
Infancy + Early Early Childhood Development of
childhood Language + Consensual
validation
• Disconnected • Momentary • Logical order
Momentary Experiences between
Experiences as recorded in experiences
totalities sequence • Temporal
• No temporal • Apparent sequencing
relationship connection present
• No meaning for • Symbolic / Co- • Logical connections
experiencing person incidental • External validity
connections • Internal Consistency
• Logic absent
Mystical experiences, Transference, Normal mature thinking
Schizophrenic fusions paranoid ideation
7 Developmental
Stages  Each stage involves specific
interpersonal challenges or tasks, and
Infancy specific types of interpersonal
Childhood relationships
Juvenile Era
Preadolescence  Personality change is most likely during
the transitions between stages
Early Adolescence
Late Adolescence
 Personality continues to evolve from
Adulthood infancy through adulthood

STAGES OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

A. Infancy
Tenderness from mothering one
Learns anxiety from the mother through empathy
B. Childhood
Imaginary playmate (i.e., eidetic
personification)
 Practice social relations/ rehearsal
 Safe, secure relationships to practice with no threat of
negative consequences

C. Juvenile Era
Need for peers of equal status
 Children learn how to compete, compromise, and
cooperate.
D. Pre-adolesence
a time for intimacy with one particular
person, usually a person with the same
gender.
boy-boy or girl-girl chumships.

E. Early Adolesence

puberty and ends with the need for sexual

love
It is marked by the eruption of genital
interest and the advent of lustful
relationships.
Intimacy and lust towards several persons.
F. Late Adolescence
Feel both intimacy and lust toward the
same person
 Learn how to live in the adult world
 Discovery of self

G. Adulthood
Person establishes a stable relationship
with a significant other person.
F. Late Adolescence
Feel both intimacy and lust toward the
same person
 Learn how to live in the adult world
 Discovery of self

G. Adulthood
Person establishes a stable relationship
with a significant other person.
Development Age Cognitive Mode Primary Need Effects of
Era Anxiety

Infancy Birth to onset of Prototaxic Bodily Contact Apathy

Language Tenderness Somnolent
detachment
Childhood Onset of Parataxic Parents’ praise Mod – chronic
language to + acceptance anxiety, insecurity
beginning school Severe –
Malevolent
Transformation

Juvenile 5-8yrs Parataxic Approval + Too great need to

acceptance control /
outside family dominate
Restrictive /
Prejudiced
Preadolescence 8-12 yrs Syntactic Genuine Inability to
intimacy with develop
chum attachment, love

Adolescence
33 Puberty onwards Syntactic -do- + lust
 MENTAL DISORDERS
 All mental disorders have an interpersonal
origin and can be understood only with
reference to the person‘s social
environment.
 Interpersonal theories emerge in 1980‘s
and 1990‘s
 Psychotherapy
 Promoted Interpersonal Psychotherapy
 Pioneered the notion of the therapist as
a participant observer.
 Originated Group Psychotherapy

ABNORMALITY
 Sullivansaw personality as being largely formed from
interpersonal relations.
 Insisted that humans have no existence outside the interpersonal situation.

 Theory emphasizes:
 social influences over biological ones;

 Rates high on unconscious determinants,

 average on free choice, optimism, and causality,

 and low on uniqueness

CONCEPT OF HUMANITY