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.
Development
Undated
Harry Stack Sullivan introduced by
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.
Relations
- 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.
Works
- 1953
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1953) is the fullest statement of Harry Stack Sullivan's theory of personality development, published four years after his death. Helen Swick Perry and Mary Ladd Gawel edited it from recordings of the lecture series he gave at the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1946–47 and from the notebooks in which he outlined those lectures; where a lecture had not been recorded, they rebuilt it from his outline. Mabel Blake Cohen's introduction warns that the chapters on infancy are hypotheses about what must happen to every infant rather than direct observations. Sullivan defines psychiatry as the study of interpersonal relations. Personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations that characterize a life, and it shows itself only in what passes between people, real or imagined. The book opens with definitions and postulates, among them the one-genus postulate that human beings are far more alike than different. Its long middle part follows the developmental epochs. In infancy the baby's needs call out tenderness in the mothering one, while her anxiety reaches the baby through empathy. The avoidance of anxiety becomes the mainspring of development. Experience is organized in three modes. The prototaxic is an undifferentiated flow. The parataxic links things that merely occur together, and it is the source of later parataxic distortions of other people. The syntaxic is consensually validated in shared language. Out of approval, disapproval and overwhelming anxiety the infant forms the personifications good-me, bad-me and not-me. From them grows the self-system, an organization of security operations, chiefly selective inattention and dissociation, that keeps anxiety down at the cost of learning from experience. Childhood brings speech and socialization. A child whose need for tenderness is met with rebuff may come to expect hostility and turn malevolent. The juvenile era teaches competition, compromise and cooperation among peers. Preadolescence brings the first capacity for love, in intimacy with a same-sex chum. Early adolescence brings the lust dynamism and its collisions with intimacy and security, and late adolescence the full range of adult relations. Personality is not settled in the first years, and each era offers a chance to repair earlier warps. A third part treats schizophrenic and paranoid states, sleep, dreams and myths as patterns of inadequate or inappropriate interpersonal relations, continuous with ordinary living. A closing chapter, drawn from Sullivan's 1948 paper, calls for a psychiatry of peoples that would address tensions between nations. The book became a founding text of interpersonal psychoanalysis.
- 1983
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell's book, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, compares the major psychoanalytic theories according to one question: where each places a person's relations with others. The authors distinguish two basic models. In the drive/structure model, which descends from Freud, relations with others are generated and shaped by the need to gratify drives. In the relational/structure model, relations are primary and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. The book reads Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis and the British object relations theories of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip as radical alternatives to drive theory. It reads the ego psychology of Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg as a strategy of accommodation, which widens drive theory to take object relations in. Kohut and Sandler are treated as mixed-model strategies that combine elements of both. A final chapter follows the divergence between the two models into debates on diagnosis and clinical technique.
See also
People
References
- The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry1953 Evidence for a relation
- Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory1983 Evidence for a relation