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.
Development
Undated
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.
In Clinical Studies in Psychiatry (1956)
Relations
- 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.
Works
- 1956
Clinical Studies in Psychiatry
A selection from the clinical lectures Harry Stack Sullivan gave to the staff of Chestnut Lodge, the psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, between October 1942 and April 1946, published after his death by W. W. Norton in 1956 and later counted as the second volume of his collected works. The editors, Helen Swick Perry, Mary Ladd Gawel and Martha Gibbon, kept about 130,000 of more than a million words, most of them from lectures given between April and November 1943. Where Sullivan's other posthumous books set out the interpersonal theory of development and the psychiatric interview, this one shows the clinician applying that theory to the disorders met in practice. After a statement of the interpersonal theory of mental disorder, it treats the processes by which anxiety is kept out of awareness — selective inattention, sublimation, dissociation and the paranoid dynamism — and the emotions, among them envy and jealousy, that can precipitate a major disorder. It then reads hysteria, obsessionalism, hypochondria, manic-depressive psychosis, schizophrenia and paranoid states as patterns of interpersonal living, and closes with the use of clinical entities as a frame of reference in therapy and with the psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Clinical Studies in Psychiatry1956Evidence for a relation