Concept
Selective inattention
In Harry Stack Sullivan's theory, the security operation by which a person simply fails to notice those parts of their experience that would arouse anxiety if attended to, without any active effort to exclude them. Unlike what is dissociated, what is selectively unattended stays close to awareness and can be noticed again fairly easily, and Sullivan regarded it as one of the most pervasive means by which the self-system keeps a person's view of themselves unchanged and prevents them from learning from experience.
Read more- Broader concept
- Security operations
- Introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan
- Key works
- 1
- Related
- Repression
introduced by
- Harry Stack Sullivan Sullivan's 1946 foreword to the book admits that the lectures leave selective inattention unstated; Patrick Mullahy's accompanying essay sets it out from Sullivan's oral teaching, and Sullivan's later clinical lectures develop it at length.
diverges from
- Repression Where Freud spoke of repression, Sullivan described material kept out of awareness by inattention, or left unformulated because it had never been put into communicable form, reserving dissociation for what the self actively refuses.