Theories of Personality: Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory

Overview

• 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
• Anxiety can interfere with satisfying interpersonal relations
• Healthy development entails experiencing intimacy and lust toward another same person

Background

• Born February 21, 1892
• Oldest existing son of poor Irish Catholic parents
• Lonely childhood existence
• Poor relationship with father
• Close friendship with Clarence Bellinger
• Academically gifted
• Poor academic performance in freshman year at Cornell
• Suffered schizophrenic breakdown
• Enrolled for medicine, receive degree 2 years after graduation
• Worked with William Alanson White
• Private practice in New York
• Zodiac group
• His therapy was neither psychoanalytic nor non-Freudian
• Died of cerebral hemorrhage on January 14, 1949
• Rumors of homosexuality

Personality

• Personality is an energy system
• Tension: potentiality for action
• Energy Transformations: action themselves

Tension

• Anxiety, premonitions, drowsiness, hunger, sexual excitement
• Not always on a conscious level
• Partial distortions of reality
• 2 Types
  • 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: overall 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/covert actions
• Behaviors that satisfy our needs and reduce anxiety
• May be observable/hidden from other people (emotions, thoughts)
• Evolves into dynamisms

Dynamisms

• traits/habitual 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)
• Malevolence
  • Disjunctive dynamism between evil and hatred
  • Feeling of living among one’s enemies
  • 2-3 years, when child is rebuffed, ignored, or punished
  • Adoption of malevolent attitude for protection
  • Timidity, mischievousness, cruelty, antisocial behavior
• Lust
  • Assumes an isolating tendency
  • Auto-erotic behavior
  • Hinders an intimate relationship
  • Increases anxiety and decreases self-worth
• Intimacy
  • Emerges in the chumship
  • 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
  • Reduces feelings of anxiety/insecurity
  • 2 Kinds
  • Dissociation
    • Includes impulses, desires, and needs that a person refuses to allow into awareness (dreams)
    • Repression
  • Selective Inattention
    • Refusal to see things that one does not wish to see (conscious)

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

• Representations of self and other

• Mental images that we acquire during development to help us understand ourselves and the world

  • A cognitive approach to understand personality

• Personifications help maintain emotional equilibrium and reduce anxiety

• Separation of good and bad

• Me

  • Bad Me, Good Me, Not Me
  • Building blocks of self-personification
  • Bad Me
  • Grows from experiences of punishment and disapproval
  • Represents those aspects of the self that are considered negative and hidden from others and possibly the self
  • Anxiety results from recognition of the bad me
  • Ex. recalling an embarrassing moment
  • Ex. guilt about a past action
  • Good Me
  • Results from experiences with reward and approval
    • Experiences associated with tenderness and intimacy
  • Everything we like about ourselves
  • The part of us we share with others and prefer to focus on because it produces no anxiety
  • Not Me
  • Anxiety provoking experiences that invoke security operations may become dissociated from self to form the not-me
    • Security operations = Sullivan’s concept of defense mechanisms
  • Experiences that are denied
  • Experiences that are kept out of awareness and repressed
    • Acknowledging not-me experiences creates high anxiety or negative emotion

  

Level of Cognition

• Refers to ways of perceiving, imagining, and conceiving
• Prototaxic: undifferentiated experiences which are highly personal
• Parataxic: communicated to others in a distorted fashion
• Syntaxic: consensually validated and symbolically communicated

Stages of Development

1. Infancy (0-2 years old)
   • Significant Other: mother
   • Interpersonal Process: tenderness
   • Learnings: good/bad
2. Childhood (2-6 years old)
   • Significant Other: parents
   • Interpersonal Process: imaginary playmates
   • Learnings: syntaxic language
3. Juvenile Era (6-8.5 years old)
   • Significant Other: playmates
   • Interpersonal Process: living with peers
   • Learnings: competition, compromise, cooperation
4. Preadolescence (8-13 years old)
   • Significant Other: single chum
   • Interpersonal Process: intimacy
   • Learnings: affection and respect
5. Early Adolescence (13-15 years old)
   • Significant Other: several chums
   • Interpersonal Process: intimacy and lust
   • Learnings: balance, security operations
6. Late Adolescence (15 years old and above)
   • Significant Other: lover
   • Interpersonal Process: fusion of intimacy and lust
   • Learnings: discovery of self and world

Psychological Disorders

• 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
• 2 broad classes of schizophrenia: organic and situational

Psychotherapy

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

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