Concept
Interpersonal psychoanalysis
The approach to psychiatry and psychoanalysis founded chiefly by Harry Stack Sullivan, which treats personality as the relatively enduring pattern of a person's recurrent dealings with other people, real or imagined, rather than as the outcome of instinctual drives unfolding within the individual. It locates the source of mental disorder in anxiety picked up from significant others and in the distortions this imposes on later relationships, and it regards the analyst as a participant in the field being studied. Carried forward by Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and institutionalized at the William Alanson White Institute, it later fed into relational psychoanalysis.
Read more- Introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Relational psychoanalysis
introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan Sullivan defined psychiatry as the study of what goes on between people, and built his theory of personality, development and mental disorder on that definition; the 1939 lectures published as Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry were its first systematic statement.
gave rise to
- Relational psychoanalysis The relational school grew out of the American interpersonal tradition of Sullivan, Fromm and Thompson, mostly among analysts trained at the White Institute. It took from that tradition its focus on actual interactions and the analyst's participation.