Harry Stack Sullivan

HARRY STACK SULLIVAN: INTERPERSONAL THEORY
OBJECTIVES:
1. Identify the different dynamisms and their roles.
2. Understand the different conditions that influences the development of a person.
3. Describe the different levels of cognition as explained by Sullivan.
4. Compare and Contrast the different aspects of personality from different theories.
OVERVIEW OF INTERPERSONAL THEORY
“A personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person
lives and has his being” (Sullivan, 1953a, p. 10).
BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY STACK SULLIVAN
Harry Stack Sullivan
Birth place: Norwich, New York
Birth date: February 21, 1892
Parents: Ella Stack Sullivan (mother) and Timothy Sullivan (father)
Son: James I. Sullivan (former James Inscoe)
Death: January 14, 1949
 Sullivan had no friends or acquaintances his own age when he was a preschooler. Throughout
his years of education at Smyrna, his classmates disliked him because of his Irish accent and
quick mind.
 He became close friends with a 13-year-old boy from a nearby farm when he was 8 and a half
years old—Clarence Bellinger was this friend.
 A bright student, graduated from high school at the age of 16 as valedictorian. Then, he enrolled
at Cornell University with the goal of becoming a physicist.
 In 1911, Sullivan enrolled in the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery. Then, he completed
his medical education in 1915, but it was not until 1917 that he was awarded a degree.
 His professional experiences as a working clinician gradually gave rise to the earliest versions of
an interpersonal theory of psychiatry.
 In March of 1930, he resigned from Sheppard. Later that year, he moved to New York City and
opened a private practice.
 Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann who, along with Sullivan, Clara
Thompson, and others, formed the Zodiac group.
 Sullivan also came under the influence of social psychologist George Herbert Mead, sociologists
Robert Ezra Park and W. I. Thomas, anthropologist Edward Sapir, and political scientist Harold
Lasswell.
 Sullivan gained knowledge from each Zodiac member, and through Thompson and Ferenczi, his
therapeutic technique was indirectly influenced by Freud. Sullivan acknowledged the impacts of
William Alanson White and Adolf Meyer, two other exceptional therapists, on his own practice.
 Sullivan held the positions of editor of the foundation's magazine, Psychiatry, and first president
of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation. The Washington School of Psychiatry was
founded by the foundation under the direction of Sullivan.
 In January 1949, Sullivan attended a meeting of the World Federation for Mental Health in
Amsterdam.
Sullivan’s Theory of Personality
I. Tensions
- is a potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness.
A. Needs
- are tensions brought on by biological imbalance between a person and the

physiochemical environment, both inside and outside the organism.
1. General needs
a. Interpersonal
b. Physiological
2. Zonal needs
a. Oral
b. Genital
c. Manual
B. Anxiety
- is a tension in opposition to the tensions of needs and to action appropriate to

their relief.
II. Energy Transformations

- Tensions that are transformed into actions, either overt or covert aimed at satisfying
needs and reducing anxiety.
III. Dynamisms
- are the behavioral patterns that characterized a person throughout a lifetime.
1. Erogenous zones
2. Tensions
a. Disjunctive dynamisms
b. Isolating dynamisms
c. Conjunctive dynamisms
A. Malevolence
- Malevolence is the disjunctive dynamism of evil and hatred, characterized
by the feeling of living among one’s enemies.
B. Intimacy
- grows out of the earlier need for tenderness but is more specific and
involves a close interpersonal relationship between two people who are more or less of
equal status.
C. Lust
- is an isolating tendency, requiring no other person for its satisfaction.
D. Self-System
- most complex and inclusive of all the dynamisms is the self-system, a
consistent pattern of behaviors that maintains people’s interpersonal security by
protecting them from anxiety by the means of security operations.
a. Dissociation inattention
b. Selective inattention
IV. Personifications
- certain images of themselves and others that people acquire.
A. Bad-Mother, Good-Mother
- is similar to Klein’s concept of the bad breast and good breast.
B. Me Personifications
- during mid-infancy a child acquires three me personifications that form the
building blocks of the self-personification.
a. Bad-me
b. Good-me
c. Not-me
C. Eidetic Personifications
- unrealistic traits or imaginary friends that many children invent in order to

protect their self-esteem.
V. Levels of Cognitions
- refer to ways of perceiving, imagining, and conceiving.
A. Prototaxic Level
- the level where the earliest and most primitive experiences of an infant take
place.
B. Parataxic Level
- are prelogical and usually result when a person assumes a cause-and-effect

relationship between two events that occur coincidentally.
C. Syntaxic Level
- experiences that are consensually validated and that can be symbolically
communicated take place on this level.
VI. Stages of Development

- Sullivan hypothesized that, “as one passes over one of these more-or-less
determinable thresholds of a developmental era, everything that has gone before
become reasonably open to influence.”
A. Infancy
B. Childhood
C. Juvenile Era
D. Preadolescence
E. Early Adolescence
F. Late Adolescence
G. Adulthood
- The successful completion of
late adolescence culminates in
adulthood, a period when
people can establish a love
relationship with at least one
significant person.
VII. Psychological Disorders

- “Everyone is much more simply human than unique, and that no matter what ails
the patient, he is mostly a person like the psychiatrist” – Sullivan (1953a)
- Sullivan (1962) distinguished two broad classes of schizophrenia.
VIII. Psychotherapy
- Sullivan based his therapeutic procedures on an effort to improve a patient’s
relationship with others.
- To accomplish goals, he concentrated his efforts on answering three continuing
questions: Precisely what is the patient saying to me? How can I best put into words
what I wish to say to the patient? What is the general pattern of communication
between us?
Concept of Humanity
“Everyone is much more simply human than otherwise”- Sullivan (1953b)
Sullivan believed that the mind contains nothing except what was put there through interpersonal
experiences. People are not motivated by instincts but by those environmental influences that come
through interpersonal relationships.

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HARRY STACK SULLIVAN: INTERPERSONAL THEORY

1. Identify the different dynamisms and their roles.

2. Understand the different conditions that influences the development of a person.

3. Describe the different levels of cognition as explained by Sullivan.

OVERVIEW OF INTERPERSONAL THEORY

BIOGRAPHY OF HARRY STACK SULLIVAN

Harry Stack Sullivan

Birth place: Norwich, New York

Birth date: February 21, 1892

Parents: Ella Stack Sullivan (mother) and Timothy Sullivan (father)

Son: James I. Sullivan (former James Inscoe)

Death: January 14, 1949

Sullivan’s Theory of Personality

- is a potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness.

- are tensions brought on by biological imbalance between a person and the

- is a tension in opposition to the tensions of needs and to action appropriate to

II. Energy Transformations

- is similar to Klein’s concept of the bad breast and good breast.

- unrealistic traits or imaginary friends that many children invent in order to

- are prelogical and usually result when a person assumes a cause-and-effect

VI. Stages of Development

VII. Psychological Disorders

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