Modes of experience

Harry Stack Sullivan's account of three ways in which experience is registered and symbolized, in the order in which they develop. In the prototaxic mode, the infant's earliest, experience is an undifferentiated flow of momentary states with no before and after, no here and there; in the parataxic mode experiences are linked by mere contiguity rather than logical connection, as private and often magical associations; in the syntaxic mode experience is formulated in symbols whose meaning is shared with and validated by others, above all in language. Much adult experience, including distorted perceptions of other people, remains parataxic.