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