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.
Development
Undated
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.
In The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953)
Relations
- 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.
Works
- 1940
Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry
Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry is Harry Stack Sullivan's text of the first William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, given in Washington in the autumn of 1939 and printed in the journal Psychiatry in February 1940; the book of 1947 adds a foreword by the author and Patrick Mullahy's extended exposition of the theory. It was the only general statement of Sullivan's theory published in his lifetime. The first lecture traces psychiatry's double descent, from medicine and from the social traditions of healers and sages, credits Freud, Adolf Meyer and William Alanson White with the move toward a complete psychiatry, and defines the field as the study of interpersonal relations, which the psychiatrist can know only as a participant observer. Conduct is organised around the pursuit of satisfactions, tied to the body, and of security, tied to culture. Anxiety, first caught empathically from the disapproval of the adults who care for the infant, shapes the self-dynamism: built from the appraisals of others, it controls what enters awareness, and what it cannot admit persists as dissociated. The second and third lectures follow the person's growth within a necessary environment of others, through infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, with its first love for a chum of the same sex and the consensual validation it brings, and adolescence. They then sketch ten developmental syndromes, among them the self-absorbed, the incorrigible, the negativistic, the ambition-ridden, the asocial, the inadequate and the chronically adolescent person, offered as better guides to a person's future than the categories of mental disease. The fourth lecture explains mental disorder as patterns of interpersonal process: parataxic distortion of situations; the substitutive states, such as obsessional, hypochondriacal and paranoid conditions; panic as the collapse of the self's power to dissociate; and schizophrenic states, which Sullivan distinguishes from dementia praecox and holds to depend on the situation for their outcome. The fifth lecture derives therapy from Freud, Meyer and White. It presents the interview as a situation both parties shape, whose work is to bring into the patient's awareness what anxiety has kept out, leading to insight into parataxic distortions, including those directed at the psychiatrist. In the foreword Sullivan calls the developmental sketch the weakest part, admits that his accounts of anxiety, the self and selective inattention are inadequate, and attacks the "delusion of unique individuality".
- 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.
See also
People
References
- The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry1953Evidence for a relation
- Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry1940Evidence for a relation