Perspectives on personality disorders

Interpersonal perspective says personality is…

best conceptualized as the social product of interactions with significant others

We are always interacting with real or imagined others and their expectations

Personality cannot be understood from the inside out

• Personality develops in context of interpersonal relationships

Father of the interpersonal perspective

Harry stack sullivan

Approach was a reaction to Freud, which made pathology a private affair

Main contribution:

• Mental disorders dramatically and tangibly manifest through the individual

• Mental disorders are created and perpetuated through maladaptive patterns of social interaction and communication

Defined personality as: the recurrent set of interpersonal situations which characterize a person’s life

Build upon Freud’s view that self-consciousness is inaccessible and remote

No essential self lies hidden beneath consciousness

• Only a concept of the self exists

• Continually being defined and redefined by the interpersonal communications of others

psychology and existentialism and sullivan

• We are never exactly sure who and what we are

• Self concept is a collection of probabilistic hypotheses

  • Some we seek to support; others we seek to deny

• Existentialism - we exist, then we define ourselves

• Interpersonalism - others are essential to the formation of our self-identity

Timothy leary levels of personality

• First level - public communication

• Second level - conscious description

• Third level - private symbolization

  • Concerned with preconscious and unconscious 

• Fourth level - unexpressed conscious

• Fifth level - values

Interpersonal circumplex

• Often called interpersonal circle

• Everything kinda blends together with things close to each other, different from DSM categorical distinctions

• X-axis is friendliness and Y-axis is dominance

• Opposing segments on the similar side of x-axis and opposite side of y-axis are complementary in real life

  • Each interpersonal bid is intended to

    • Exclude invalidating responses

    • Include only validating responses

  • If each person successfully controls the response class of the other, needs of each party are satisfied

  • Dominance pulls for submission, submission pulls for dominance, friendliness pulls for friendliness, hate for hate

personality is a…

 self-fulfilling prophecy

“A person brings about the very consequences of his or her own prediction… simply by virtue of the effects of the prediction itself”

• Ex. a competitive individual views others as competitive and becomes even more competitive