Harry Stack Sullivan’s

INTERPERSONAL THEORY
 Biography: Harry Stack Sullivan
• He is a sole surviving child of poor Irish
Catholic parents.
• He was pampered and protected by his
mother as an only child.
• He has never developed a close relationship
with his father until after his mother’s death
and he became a prominent physician.
• When he was 8 ½ years old, he formed a
close friendship with a 13-year-old boy
from a neighboring farm.
• That “chum” was Clarence Bellinger.
• Both of them were socially challenged but
intellectually advanced, became psychiatrists
and has never married.
• Six years after becoming a physician and with
no training in psychiatry, he gained a position
at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
as a psychiatrist.
• His ability to work with schizophrenic patients
won him a reputation as a therapeutic wizard.
 Tensions
Sullivan saw personality as an energy
system, with energy existing either as
tension (potentiality for action) or as
energy transformations (the actions
themselves). He further divided
tensions into needs and anxiety.
 2 Types of Tension
1. Needs

- Can relate either to the general well-

being of a person or to specific zones
(e.g. the mouth or genitals).
- General needs can be either
physiological, such as food or
oxygen, or they can be interpersonal,
such as tenderness and intimacy.
2. Anxiety

- is disjunctive and calls for no

consistent actions for its relief.
Sullivan cited anxiety as the chief
disruptive force in healthy
interpersonal relations while he
called a complete absence of anxiety
and other tensions a euphoria.
 Dynamisms
Sullivan used the term “dynamism” to
refer to a typical pattern of behavior.
Dynamisms may relate either to
specific zones of the body or to
tensions.
A. Malevolence
- The disjunctive dynamism of evil and
hatred.
- It is defined by Sullivan as a feeling
of living among one's enemies.
- Those children who become
malevolent have much difficulty
giving and receiving tenderness or
being intimate with other people.
B. Intimacy
- The conjunctive dynamism
marked by a close personal
relationship between two people
of equal status.
- Intimacy facilitates interpersonal
development while decreasing
both anxiety and loneliness.
C. Lust

- An isolating dynamism.
- It is a self-centred need that can be satisfied
in the absence of an intimate interpersonal
relationship.
- In other words, although intimacy
presupposes tenderness or love, lust is based
solely on sexual gratification and requires
no other person for its satisfaction.
D. Self-System

- The most inclusive of all

dynamisms that protects us against
anxiety and maintains our
interpersonal security.
- The self-system is a conjunctive
dynamism, but because its primary
job is to protect the self from
anxiety, it tends to stifle
personality change.
Security operations
According to Sullivan, experiences that
are inconsistent with our self-system
threaten our security and necessitate
our use of security operation, which
consist of behaviors designed to reduce
interpersonal tensions
Security operations
•Two important security operations according to Sullivan are
Dissociation and Selective inattention

Dissociation
•According to Sullivan, this security operation includes those
impulses, desires, and needs that a person refuses to allow into
awareness
 
Selective inattention
•According to Sullivan, this security operation is a refusal to see
those things that we do not wish to see. The control of focal
awareness.
 Personifications
Sullivan believed that people acquire
certain images of self and others
throughout the developmental stages,
and he referred to these subjective
perceptions as personifications.
A. Bad-Mother, Good-Mother

- Grows out of infants' experiences with a nipple

that does not satisfy their hunger needs.
- All infants experience the bad-mother
personification, even though their real
mothers love and nurture them.
- Later, infants acquire a good-mother
personification as they become mature
enough to recognize the tender and
cooperative behavior of their mothering one.
B. “Me” Personifications
- is acquired during infancy, and has three "me"
personifications:

1. Bad-me: grows from experiences of punishment

and disapproval,
2. Good-me: results from experiences with reward
and approval,
3. Not-me: allows a person to dissociate or
selectively inattend the experiences related to
anxiety.
C. Eidetic Personifications

- Based on one of Sullivan's most interesting

observations wherein people often create
imaginary traits that they project onto
others.
- Included in these personifications are the
imaginary playmates that preschool-aged
children often have which enable them to
have a safe and secure relationship with
another person, though only imaginary.
 Levels of Cognition

Sullivan recognized and divided

cognition into three levels or modes
of experience. Levels of cognition
refer to ways of perceiving,
imagining and conceiving.
Prototaxic Level
It includes experiences that are
impossible to put into words or
communicate to others. Newborn
infants experience images mostly on a
prototaxic level, but adults, too,
frequently have preverbal experiences
for a moment that are incapable of
being communicated.
Parataxic Level

It includes experiences that are pre-

logical and nearly impossible to
accurately communicate to others.
Included in these are erroneous
assumptions about cause and effect
Syntaxic Level

This involves experiences that can be

accurately communicated to others.
Children become capable of syntaxic
language at about 12 to 18 months of
age, when words begin to have the
same meaning for them that they do
for others.
 Developmental Epochs

Sullivan saw interpersonal development

as taking place over seven stages,
from infancy to mature adulthood.
Personality changes can take place at
any time but are more likely to occur
during transitions between stages.
Infancy (Age birth to 1 year)

This is the period from birth until the

emergence of syntaxic language. A time
when the child receives tenderness from the
mothering one while also learning anxiety
through an empathic linkage with the mother.
Anxiety may increase to the point of terror, but
such terror is controlled by the built-in
protections of apathy and somnolent
detachment that allow the baby to go to
sleep.
Childhood (Ages 1 to 5)

This is the stage that lasts from the

beginning of syntaxic language until
the need for playmates of equal status.
The child's primary interpersonal
relationship continues to be with the
mother, who is now differentiated from
other persons who nurture the child.
Juvenile Era (Ages 6 to 8)

The juvenile stage begins with the need for

peers of equal status and continues until the
child develops a need for an intimate
relationship with a “chum”.
At this time, children should learn how to
compete, to compromise and to cooperate.
These three abilities, as well as an orientation
toward living, help a child develop intimacy.
Preadolescence (Ages 9 to 12)

It is the most crucial stage among all of

Sullivan’s developmental epochs.
Preadolescence spans the time from the
need for a single best friend until
puberty.
Children who do not learn intimacy
during preadolescence have added
difficulties relating to potential sexual
partners during later stages.
Early Adolescence (Ages 13 to 17)

Development during this stage is ordinarily

marked by a coexistence of intimacy with a
single friend of the same gender and sexual
interest in many persons of the opposite
gender.
However, if children have no pre-existing
capacity for intimacy, they may confuse lust
with love and develop sexual relationships that
are devoid
of true intimacy.
Late Adolescence (Ages 18 to 22 or 23)

Chronologically, late adolescence may start at

any time after about the age of 16, but
psychologically, it begins when a person is
able to feel both intimacy and lust toward the
same person.
Late adolescence is characterized by a stable
pattern of sexual activity and the growth of the
syntaxic mode, as young people learn how to
live in the adult world.
Adulthood (Ages 23 and on)

Late adolescence flows into adulthood, a

time when a person establishes a stable
relationship with a significant other
person and develops a consistent pattern
of viewing the world
Implication to Social Work
Sullivan pioneered the notion of the therapist
as a participant observer. He was
primarily concerned with understanding
patients and helping them develop
foresight,
improve interpersonal relations, and
restore their ability to operate mostly on a
syntaxic level.
Interpersonal theory promotes a more
dynamic working relationship between
the worker and the client and enhances
the latter’s interpersonal skills.
Sullivan gave emphasis and
importance in the participation of
the worker in the whole
intervention process, thus, making
his theory one of the most effective
framework used in the Problem-
Solving method of the Social Work
profession.
Thank You!