CHAPTER 8
SULLIVAN: INTERPERSONAL THEORY
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Overview of Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory
Although
Sullivan had a lonely and isolated childhood, he evolved a theory of
personality that emphasized the importance of interpersonal relations. He
insisted that personality is shaped almost entirely by one’s relationships with
other people. Sullivan’s principal contribution to personality theory was his
conception of developmental stages, which he saw as having strong interpersonal
influences.
II. Biography of Harry Stack Sullivan
Harry
Stack Sullivan, the first American to develop a comprehensive personality
theory, was born in a small farming community in upstate New York in 1892. A
socially immature and isolated child, Sullivan nevertheless formed one close
interpersonal relationship with a boy five years older than him. In his
interpersonal theory, Sullivan believed that such a relationship has the power
to transform an immature preadolescent into a psychologically healthy
individual. Sullivan had only one somewhat undistinguished year of college work
before he entered medical school, and after receiving a medical degree, his
career showed little promise of success. Six years after becoming a physician,
and with no training in psychiatry, he gained a position at St. Elizabeth’s
Hospital in Washington, D.C., as a psychiatrist. There, his ability to work with
schizophrenic patients won him a reputation as a therapeutic wizard. However,
despite achieving much respect from an influential group of associates,
Sullivan had few close interpersonal relations with any of his peers. He died
alone in Paris in 1949, at age 56.
III. Tensions
Sullivan
conceptualized personality as an energy system, with energy existing either as
tension (potentiality for action) or as energy transformations (the actions
themselves). He further divided tensions into needs and anxiety.
Needs
can relate either to the general well-being of a person or to specific zones,
such as the mouth or genitals. General needs can be either physiological, such
as food or oxygen, or interpersonal, such as tenderness and intimacy.
B. Anxiety
Unlike
needs—which are conjunctive and call for specific action to reduce them—anxiety
is disjunctive and calls for no consistent actions for its relief. All infants
learn to be anxious through the empathic
relationship that they have with their mothering one. Sullivan compared
anxiety to a blow on the head and contended that it was the chief disruptive
force in interpersonal relations. A complete absence of anxiety and other
tensions is called euphoria.
IV. Dynamisms
Sullivan
used the term dynamism to refer to a typical pattern of behavior. Dynamisms may
relate either to specific zones of the body or to tensions.
A. Malevolence
The
disjunctive dynamism of evil and hatred is called malevolence, defined by
Sullivan as a feeling of living among one’s enemies. Those children who become
malevolent have difficulty giving and receiving tenderness or being intimate
with other people.
B. Intimacy
The
conjunctive dynamism marked by a close personal relationship between two people
of equal status is called intimacy. Whereas malevolence blocks healthy
personality development, intimacy facilitates development and decreases both
anxiety and loneliness.
C. Lust
In
contrast to both malevolence and intimacy, lust is an isolating dynamism,
because it is a self-centered need. Whereas intimacy presupposes tenderness or
love, lust is based solely on sexual gratification and requires no other person
for
its satisfaction.
D. Self-System
The most
inclusive of all dynamisms is the self-system, or that pattern of behaviors
that protects people against anxiety and maintains their interpersonal
security. Like intimacy, the self-system is a conjunctive dynamism, but because
its primary job is to protect the self from anxiety, it tends to stifle
personality change. Experiences that are inconsistent with people’s self-system
threaten their security and necessitate their use of security operations, which consist of behaviors designed to reduce
interpersonal tensions. One such security operation is dissociation, which includes all those experiences that a person
blocks from awareness. Another is selective
inattention, which involves blocking only certain experiences from
awareness.
V. Personifications
Sullivan
believed that people acquire certain images of self and others throughout the
developmental stages, and he referred to these subjective perceptions as
personifications.
A. Bad-Mother,
Good-Mother
The
bad-mother personification grows out of infants’ experiences with a nipple that
does not satisfy their hunger needs. All infants experience the bad-mother
personification, even though their real mothers may be loving and nurturing.
Later, infants acquire a good-mother personification as they become mature enough to recognize the tender and
cooperative behavior of their mothering one. Still later, these two
personifications combine to form a complex and contrasting image of the real
mother.
B. Me
Personifications
During
infancy, children acquire three me personifications: (1) the bad-me, which grows from experiences of
punishment and disapproval, (2) the good-me,
which results from experiences with reward and approval, and (3) the not-me, which allows a person to
dissociate or selectively inattend experiences related to anxiety.
C. Eidetic
Personifications
One of
Sullivan’s most interesting observations was that people often create imaginary
traits that they project onto others. Included in these eidetic
personifications are the imaginary
playmates that preschool-aged children often have. These imaginary friends
enable children to have a safe, secure relationship and to practice
interpersonal relations with no threat of negative consequences.
Sullivan
recognized three levels of cognition, or ways of perceiving things: prototaxic,
parataxic, and syntaxic.
A. Prototaxic Level
Experiences
that are impossible to put into words or to communicate to others are called
prototaxic. Newborn infants experience images mostly on a prototaxic level, but
adults, too, frequently have preverbal experiences that are momentary and
incapable of being communicated.
B. Parataxic Level
Experiences
that are prelogical and nearly impossible to accurately communicate to others
are called parataxic. Included in these are erroneous assumptions about cause
and effect, which Sullivan termed parataxic
distortions.
C. Syntaxic Level
Experiences
that can be accurately communicated to others are called syntaxic. Children
become capable of syntaxic language at about 12 to 18 months of age when words
begin to have the same meaning for them that they do for others.
VII. Stages of Development
Sullivan
saw interpersonal development as taking place over seven stages, from infancy
to mature adulthood. Personality change can take place at any time, but it is most
likely to occur during transitions between stages.
A. Infancy
Sullivan’s
definition of infancy includes the period from birth until the emergence of
syntaxic language. During infancy, a child’s relationship with the mothering
one includes two opposing forces, tenderness and anxiety. Because anxiety is a
tension in opposition to needs and because it is expressed in the same way as
hunger needs (i.e., by crying), mothers sometimes feed an anxious baby, which
leads to tension increasing to the point of terror. Such terror is reduced by
the built-in protections of apathy
and somnolent detachment that allow
the baby to go to sleep. During infancy, children use autistic language, which
takes place on a prototaxic or parataxic level.
B. Childhood
The
childhood stage lasts from the beginning of syntaxic language until the need
for playmates of equal status. The child’s primary interpersonal relationship
continues to be with the mother, who is now differentiated from other persons
who
nurture the child. Another important relationship during childhood is with
imaginary playmates.
The
juvenile era begins with the need for peers of equal status and continues until
the child develops a need for an intimate relationship with a chum, or a single
best friend. During the juvenile stage, children should learn how to compete, compromise, and cooperate.
These three abilities, as well as an orientation toward living, help a child
develop intimacy, the chief dynamism of the next developmental stage.
D. Preadolescence
Perhaps
the most crucial of Sullivan’s stages is preadolescence. This is because
mistakes made earlier can be rectified during preadolescence, whereas errors
made during preadolescence are nearly impossible to overcome in later life.
Preadolescence spans the time from the need for a single best friend until the
eruption of lust, or from about age 8 or 9 until puberty. Preadolescents
typically form close relationships with friends of the same gender, although
cross-gender chumships are also possible. Children who do not learn intimacy
during preadolescence have added difficulties relating to potential sexual
partners during later stages.
E. Early Adolescence
With
puberty comes the lust dynamism and the beginning of early
adolescence. Development during this
stage is marked by a coexistence of intimacy with a single friend of the same
gender and sexual interest in many persons of the opposite gender. However, if
children have no preexisting capacity for intimacy, they may confuse lust with
love and develop sexual relationships that are devoid of true intimacy.
Sullivan believed that people who emerge from early adolescence in command of
both their intimacy and lust dynamisms will have few serious interpersonal
difficulties in later life.
F. Late Adolescence
Chronologically,
late adolescence may start at any time after about age 16, but psychologically,
it begins when a person is able to feel both intimacy and lust toward the same
person. Late adolescence is characterized by a stable pattern of sexual
activity and the growth of the syntaxic mode as young people learn how to live
in the adult world.
G. Adulthood
Late
adolescence flows into adulthood, a time when a person establishes a stable
relationship with a significant other person. However, not everyone reaches
emotional adulthood.
VIII. Psychological Disorders
Sullivan believed that
disordered behavior can only be understood with reference to a person’s
interpersonal world. Most of Sullivan’s early therapeutic experiences were with
schizophrenic patients with whom he had very good success in treating.
IX. Psychotherapy
Sullivan
pioneered the notion of the therapist as a participant
observer who establishes an
interpersonal relationship with the patient. This dyadic relationship between a
patient and a participating therapist serves as a model, helping the patient
learn to improve relationships with significant others. Sullivanian
therapists attempt to help patients develop foresight, discover difficulties in
interpersonal relations, and restore their ability to participate in
consensually validated experiences.
X. Related Research
In the
years immediately following Sullivan’s death, psychologists conducted little empirical
research that flowed directly from his theory. However, more recently, a number
of researchers have studied the impact of two-person relationships, which
relate directly to Sullivan’s notion of the therapist as a participant observer
in an interpersonal relationship.
A. Therapist-Patient
Relationships
William
Henry, Hans Strupp, and their associates at Vanderbilt have used the Structural
Analysis of Social Behavior to study the dynamics between a therapist’s
personality and behavior and a patient’s reactions and outcomes. An early study
(Henry, Schacht, & Strupp, 1990) reported that patients developed
relatively stable behaviors that were consistent with the way their therapists
treated them. More recently, a team of researchers (Hilliard, Henry, &
Strupp, 2000) found that the early developmental histories of both the
therapists and the patients contributed to therapeutic outcome. Indeed,
therapists’ personal histories had a more powerful effect than their training
on patient outcome.
B. Intimate
Relationships with Friends
Some
researchers (Yaughn & Nowicki, 1999) have examined Sullivan’s notion that
healthy interpersonal relationships are complementary, meaning that each person
satisfies the healthy needs of the other person. These investigators found
partial support for this hypothesis; that is, they found that college women,
but not men, reported complementary interpersonal styles with their close
friends. They also found that women were more likely than men to engage in a
wide variety of activities with their intimate friends.
C. Imaginary Friends
Researchers
have also studied Sullivan’s notion of imaginary playmates and have found that
children who have identifiable eidetic playmates are more socialized, less
aggressive, more intelligent, more creative, and have a better sense of humor
than children who do not report having an imaginary playmate (Bouldin &
Pratt, 1999; Fern, 1991; Seiffge-Krenke, 1993, 1997).
XI. Critique of Sullivan
Despite Sullivan’s insights
into the importance of interpersonal relations, his theory of personality and
his approach to psychotherapy have become less popular in recent years. In
summary, his theory rates very low on falsifiability and low in its ability to
generate research and to present a parsimonious picture of personality. We rate
it about average in its capacity to organize knowledge, to guide action, and to
be self-consistent.
XII. Concept of Humanity
Sullivan saw human personality as being shaped largely from interpersonal relations. Thus, his theory places great emphasis on social influences and very little on biological ones. In addition, Sullivanian theory rates high on unconscious determinants of behavior, low on uniqueness, and about average on free choice, optimism, and causality.