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| Psychoanalysis |
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Interpersonal psychoanalysis is based on the theories of American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949). Sullivan believed that the details of a patient's interpersonal interactions with others can provide insight into the causes and cures of mental disorder.[1][2]
Current practitioners stress such features as the detailed description of clinical experience, the mutuality of the interpersonal process, and the not-knowing of the analyst.[3]
Along with other neo-Freudian practitioners of interpersonal psychoanalysis, such as Horney, Fromm, Thompson and Fromm-Reichman, Sullivan repudiated Freudian drive theory.[4]
They, like Sullivan, also shared the interdisciplinary emphasis that was to be an important part of the legacy of interpersonal psychoanalysis, influencing counsellors, clergymen, social workers and more.[5]
Sullivan proposed that patients could keep certain aspects or components of their interpersonal relationships out of their awareness by a psychological behavior described as selective inattention - a term that has to a degree passed into common usage.
A defence mechanism that functions prior to psychological repression, and acts by way of blocking all notice of the threat in question, selective inattention can also be accompanied by selective non-participation.[6]
Both defences as used by patients may be usefully identified by the analyst through examination of his/her countertransference.[7]
Sullivan emphasized that psychotherapists' analyses should focus on patients' relationships and personal interactions in order to obtain knowledge of what he called personifications – one's internalised views of self and others, one's internal schemata.[8]
Such analyses would consist of detailed questioning regarding moment-to-moment personal interactions, even including those with the analyst himself.
Personifications can form the basis for what Sullivan called parataxic distortions of the interpersonal field – distortions similar to those described as the products of transference and projective identification in orthodox psychoanalysis.[9] As with the latter, parataxic distortion can, if identified by the analyst, prove fruitful clues to the nature of the patient's inner world.[10]
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See also: Psychoanalysis § Criticism, and Psychotherapy § General critiques |
Sullivan has been criticised for inventing (sometimes opaque) neologisms for established psychoanalytic concepts, to claim a perhaps spurious intellectual independence.[11]
