Sullivan

• Interpersonal theory


  People develop their personality within a social context. Without other people, humans would have no personality. Development rests on the individual's ability to establish intimacy with another person.
• Healthy development


  • Experiencing intimacy and lust toward another same person
• Anxiety


  Can interfere with satisfying interpersonal relations
• Personality


  • An energy system
  • Tension - potentiality for action
  • Energy Transformations - actions themselves
• Tension


  • Anxiety, premonitions, drowsiness, hunger, sexual excitement
  • Not always on a conscious level
  • Partial distortions of reality
  • Two Types: Needs and Anxiety
• Needs


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


  • 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
  • Stems from complex interpersonal relations
  • Vaguely represented in awareness
  • No positive value
  • Blocks satisfaction of needs
• Energy Transformations


  • 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
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  • Traits or habit patterns
  • Major Classes: Related to specific zones of the body, Disjunctive (Malevolence), Isolating (Lust), Conjunctive (Intimacy and Self-System)
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  • Disjunctive dynamism between evil and hatred
  • Feeling of living among one's enemies
  • Adoption of malevolent attitude for protection
  • Timidity, Mischievousness, Cruelty, anti-social behavior
• Lust


  • Assumes an isolating tendency
  • Auto-erotic behavior
  • Hinders an intimate relationship
  • Increases anxiety and decreases self-worth
• Intimacy


  • 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
• 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
• Security Operations


  • Dissociation - includes impulses, desires, and needs that a person refuses to allow into awareness
  • Selective Inattention - refusal to see things that one does not wish to see
  • Reduces feelings of anxiety or insecurity
• Personifications


  • People's images of themselves or others
  • Begins in infancy and continues throughout development
  • Bad mother - good mother, Me, Eidetic Personifications
• Bad Mother - Good Mother


  Similar to Klein's Good Breast and Bad Breast
• Me


  • Bad Me, Good Me, Not Me
  • Building blocks of Self-personification
• Eidetic Personifications


  • Imaginary Friends
  • Projection of traits to other people
• Levels of Cognition


  • Prototaxic - undifferentiated experiences which are highly personal
  • Parataxic - communicated to others in a distorted fashion
  • Syntaxic - consensually validated and symbolically communicated
• 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
• Schizophrenia


  Two broad classes: Organic and Situational
• Psychotherapy


  • Therapist is a participant observer who establishes an interpersonal relationship with the patient and provides opportunity for syntaxic communication
  • Sullivanian therapists attempt to help patients develop foresight, discover difficulties in interpersonal relations, and restore their ability to participate in consensually validated experiences
• Sullivan's theory is based on the idea that humans are social beings who seek out relationships with others.