Concept
Parataxic distortion
Harry Stack Sullivan's term for misperceiving a person in a present relationship through patterns formed in relationships with significant figures of the past, so that one deals with a partly imagined other rather than with the person actually there. He used it in place of, and more widely than, transference: it occurs in every relationship, not only toward the analyst, and it can be corrected through consensual validation, as a person compares their view with that of others.
- Broader concept
- Modes of experience
- Introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Transference
introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan Sullivan illustrated the term with a patient who, after hundreds of hours, discovered that she had been seeing him as a fat old man with white hair.
derives from
- Transference Sullivan put his own term in place of Freud's transference and widened it: parataxic distortion colours every relationship, not only the patient's relation to the analyst.