sullivan

• Harry Stack Sullivan


  The first American to construct a comprehensive personality theory
• Sullivan's personality theory

  • People develop their personality within a social context
  • Without other people, humans would have no personality
  • "A personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being"
• Sullivan's interpersonal theory


  Knowledge of human personality can be gained only through the scientific study of interpersonal relations
• Developmental stages in Sullivan's theory

  1. Infancy

  2. Childhood

  3. Juvenile era

  4. Preadolescence

  5. Early adolescence

  6. Late adolescence

  7. Adulthood
• Healthy human development

  • Rests on a person's ability to establish intimacy with another person
  • Anxiety can interfere with satisfying interpersonal relations at any age
• Preadolescence


  • A period when children first possess the capacity for intimacy but have not yet reached an age at which their intimate relationships are complicated by lustful interests
• Sullivan believed that people achieve healthy development when they are able to experience both intimacy and lust toward the same other person
• Personality

  An energy system
• Energy

  • Can exist as tension (potentiality for action)
  • Can exist as actions themselves (energy transformations)
• Energy transformations

  1. Transform tensions into either covert or overt behaviors

  2. Aimed at satisfying needs and reducing anxiety
• Tension

  A potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness
• Not all tensions are consciously felt
• Tensions that are felt but not always on a conscious level

  • Anxiety
  • Premonitions
  • Drowsiness
  • Hunger
  • Sexual excitement
• Probably all felt tensions are at least partial distortions of reality
• Types of tensions

  • Needs
  • Anxiety
• Needs


  Usually result in productive actions
• Anxiety


  Leads to nonproductive or disintegrative behaviors
• Needs


  Tensions brought on by biological imbalance between a person and the physiochemical environment, both inside and outside the organism
• Needs

  • They are episodic - once they are satisfied, they temporarily lose their power, but after a time, they are likely to recur
  • Although they originally have a biological component, many of them stem from the interpersonal situation
• Tenderness


  The most basic interpersonal need
• Tenderness need development

  1. Infant develops a need to receive tenderness from its primary caretaker (called by Sullivan "the mothering one")

  2. Tenderness requires actions from at least two people
• Unlike some needs, tenderness requires actions from at least two people
• His interpersonal theory emphasizes the importance of various developmental stages
• Tenderness is a general need because it is concerned with the overall wellbeing of a person.
• General needs, which also include oxygen, food, and water, are opposed to zonal needs, which arise from a particular area of the body.
• While satisfying general needs for food, water, and so forth, an infant expends more energy than necessary, and the excess energy is transformed into consistent characteristic modes of behavior, which Sullivan called dynamisms.
• A second type of tension, anxiety, differs from tensions of needs in that it is disjunctive, is more diffuse and vague, and calls forth no consistent actions for its relief.
• How does anxiety originate? Sullivan (1953b) postulated that it is transferred from the parent to the infant through the process of empathy. Anxiety in the mothering one inevitably induces anxiety in the infant.
• Anxiety has a deleterious effect on adults too. It is the chief disruptive force blocking the development of healthy interpersonal relations.
• anxiety makes people incapable of learning, impairs memory, narrows perception, and may result in complete amnesia
• Sullivan insisted that anxiety and loneliness are unique among all experiences in that they are totally unwanted and undesirable. Because anxiety is painful, people have a natural tendency to avoid it, inherently preferring the state of euphoria, or complete lack of tension.
• Anxiety is a tension in opposition to the tensions of needs and to action appropriate to their relief
• Tensions that are transformed into actions, either overt or covert, are called energy transformations.
• This somewhat awkward term simply refers to our behaviors that are aimed at satisfying needs and reducing anxiety—the two great tensions.
• Energy transformations become organized as typical behavior patterns that characterize a person throughout a lifetime. Sullivan (1953b) called these behavior patterns dynamisms, a term that means about the same as traits or habit patterns.
• Dynamisms are of two major classes:

  first, those related to specific zones of the body, including the mouth, anus, and genitals; and second, those related to tensions. This second class is composed of three categories—the disjunctive, the isolating, and the conjunctive
• Disjunctive dynamisms include those destructive patterns of behavior that are related to the concept of malevolence
• isolating dynamisms include those behavior patterns (such as lust) that are unrelated to interpersonal relations
• conjunctive dynamisms include beneficial behavior patterns, such as intimacy and the self-system.
• Malevolence is the disjunctive dynamism of evil and hatred, characterized by the feeling of living among one’s enemies