1. INTERPERSONAL THEORY
Harry Stack Sullivan

2. Overview

People develop their personality within a social
context.
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Without other people, humans would have no
personality.

Development rests on the individual’s ability to
establish intimacy with another person.

Anxiety can interfere with satisfying
interpersonal relations.

3. Overview

Healthy development entails experiencing
intimacy and lust toward another same
person.

4. Harry Stack Sullivan
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Born Feb. 21, 1892
Oldest existing son of poor
Irish Catholic parents
Lonely childhood existence
Poor relationship with
father.
Close friendship with
Clarence Bellinger.
Academically gifted.

5. Harry Stack Sullivan
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Poor academic performance
in freshman year at Cornell.
Suffered a schizophrenic
breakdown.
Enrolled for Medicine,
received degree 2 yrs after
graduation.
Work with William Alanson
Whte.

6. Harry Stack Sullivan
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Private practice in New
York
Zodiac Group
His therapy was neither
psychoanalytic nor neoFreudian.
Died of Cerebral
Hemorrhage on Jan. 14,
1949.
Rumors of homosexuality

7. Personality

Personality is an energy system.
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Tension – potentiality for action
Energy Transformations – actions themselves

8. Tension
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Anxiety, premonitions,
drowsiness, hunger,
sexual excitement.
Not always on a
conscious level
Partial distortions of
reality
Two Types:
 Needs
 Anxiety

9. Needs
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Tensions brought about by a biological
imbalance between the person and
environment.
Episodic
Biological component and interpersonal
relations.
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Zonal Needs – arises from a specific body
part.
General Needs – over all well being of a
person.
Tenderness is a basic interpersonal need.

10. Anxiety
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Disjunctive, diffuse and vague, call forth
no consistent action for relief.
Transferred through empathy.
Chief disruptive force blocking the
development of healthy interpersonal
relations.
 Prevents people from learning from
mistakes
 Persisting pursuance of childish wish
for security
 Ensures people will not learn from
experience.
 Its presence is worse than its absence.

11. Anxiety
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Stems from complex interpersonal
relations.
Vaguely represented in awareness
No positive value
Blocks satisfaction of needs

12. Energy Transformations
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Tensions transformed into either overt or covert
actions.
Behaviors that satisfy our needs and reduce anxiety.
May be observable or hidden from other people
(emotions, thoughts)

13. Energy Transformations
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Tensions transformed into either overt or covert
actions.
Behaviors that satisfy our needs and reduce anxiety.
May be observable or hidden from other people
(emotions, thoughts)
Evolves into dynamisms

14. Dynamisms
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Traits or habit patterns
Major Classes:
 Related to specific zones of the body
 Mouth, anus, genitals
 Those related to tensions
 Disjunctive (Malevolence)
 Isolating (Lust)
 Conjunctive (Intimacy and Self- System)

15. Malevolence
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Disjunctive dynamism
between evil and hatred.
Feeling of living among
one’s enemies
2-3 yrs, when child is
rebuffed, ignored, or
punished.
Adoption of malevolent
attitude for protection.
Timidity, Mischievousness,
Cruelty, anti-social
behavior.

16. Lust
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Assumes an isolating
tendency.
Auto-erotic behavior
Hinders an intimate
relationship.
Increases anxiety and
decreases self- worth.

17. Intimacy
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Close interpersonal relationship between 2 people
of equal status.
Equal partnership
Integrating dynamism that draws out loving
reactions from people.
Decreases loneliness and anxiety
Rewarding experiences most healthy people desire.

18. Self- System
Most complex and inclusive of
all dynamisms.
 Consistent pattern of behavior
that
maintains
people’s
interpersonal
security
by
protecting them from anxiety.
 Principal
stumbling block to
favorable changes in personality.
 Security Operations
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19. Security Operations
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Reduces feelings of anxiety or insecurity.
Two kinds:
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Dissociation = includes impulses, desires, and needs
that a person refuses to allow into awareness. (dreams)
Selective Inattention = refusal to see things that one
does not wish to see. (conscious)

20. Personifications
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People’s images of themselves or others
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Begins in infancy and continues throughout
development.
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Bad mother – good mother
Me
Eidetic Personifications

21. Bad Mother- Good Mother
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Similar to Klein’s Good Breast and Bad Breast.

22. Me
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Bad Me, Good Me, Not Me
Building blocks of self- personification

23. Eidetic Personifications
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Imaginary Friends
Projection of traits to other people

24. Levels of Cognition
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Refers to ways of perceiving, imagining, and
conceiving.
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Prototaxic – undifferentiated experiences
which are highly personal.
Parataxic – communicated to others in a
distorted fashion.
Syntaxic – consensually validated and
symbolically communicated.
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25. Stages of Development
Stage
Age
Significant
Other
Interpersonal
Process
Learnings
Infancy
0-2
Mother
Tenderness
Good / Bad
Childhood
2-6
Parents
Imaginary
Playmates
Syntaxic
Language
Juvenile Era
6-8.5
Playmates
Living with Peers
Competition,
Compromise,
Cooperation
Preadolescence 8.5 –
13
Single Chum
Intimacy
Affection &
Respect
Early
Adolescence
13 –
15
Several Chums
Intimacy and Lust
Balance,
Security
Operations
Late
Adolescence
15 -
Lover
Fusion of Intimacy
and Lust
Discovery of
self & world

26. Psychological Disorders
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All psychological disorders have an interpersonal
origin and must be understood with reference to
social environment
Deficiencies found in psychiatric patients are
found in every person to a lesser degree
Psychological difficulties are not unique, but come
from same interpersonal difficulties we all face
Two broad classes of schizophrenia
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Organic
Situational

27. Psychotherapy
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Therapist is a participant observer who
establishes an interpersonal relationship
with the patient and provides opportunity
for syntaxic communication
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Sullivanian therapists attempt to help
patients develop foresight, discover
difficulties in interpersonal relations, and
restore their ability to participate in
consensually validated experiences