Explain the salient features of Sullivan’s theory of personality.

 Harry Stack Sullivan was born in Norwich, near New York and died in 1949 in Paris. He received his medical degree in 1917 and served with the armed forces in World War I. In 1922 he met William Alanson White, a leader in American Neuropsychiatry. Then he conducted investigations in Schizophrenia that established his reputation as a clinician. Although Sullivan was trained in psychoanalysis in the United States, but soon drifted from the specific psychoanalytic beliefs while retaining much of the core concepts of Freud.

Interestingly, Sullivan placed a lot of focus on both the social aspects of personality and cognitive representations. Sullivan called his approach an interpersonal theory of psychiatry because he believed psychiatry is the study of what goes on between people. This is in contrast to Freud’s paradigm that focuses on what goes on inside people. Freud’s is a drive model while Sullivan’s is an interpersonal model.

For Sullivan, relationships are primary. Personality is a hypothetical entity that cannot be observed or studied apart from interpersonal situations wherein it is made manifest. The only way personality can be known is through the medium of interpersonal interactions. Therefore the unit of study is not the individual person, but the interpersonal situation. Sullivan’s theory can be explained under three main headings:

• Dynamics of personality

• Enduring aspect of personality

• Developmental epochs

Dynamics of Personality

Sullivan conceptualised personality as an energy system, with energy existing either as tension (potentiality for action) or as energy transformations (the actions themselves). He further divided tensions into needs and anxiety.

Needs can relate either to the general well-being of a person or to specific zones, such as the mouth or genitals. General needs can be either physiological, such as food or oxygen, or they can be interpersonal, such as tenderness and intimacy.

Unlike needs, which are conjunctive and call for specific actions to reduce them anxiety is disjunctive and calls for no consistent actions for its relief. All infants learn to be anxious through the empathic relationship that they have with their mothering one. Sullivan called anxiety the chief disruptive force in interpersonal relations. A complete absence of anxiety and other tensions is called euphoria.

Sullivan recognised three levels of cognition, or ways of perceiving things

• Prototaxic

• Parataxic and

• Syntaxic.

Prototaxic level contains the primitive experience of infants. Experiences that are impossible to put into words or to communicate to others are called prototaxic. Newborn infants experience images mostly on a prototaxic level.

Experiences that are prelogical and nearly impossible to accurately communicate to others are called parataxic. Included in these are erroneous assumptions about cause and effect, which Sullivan termed parataxic distortions.

Experiences that can be accurately communicated to others are called syntaxic. Children become capable of syntaxic language at about 12 to 18 months of age when words begin to have the same meaning for them that they do for others.

Although all the three types of experiences are found in the whole life span of the individual but in the life of a normal person the syntaxic experiences remain dominated.

Enduring Aspects of Personality

Sullivan, in his theory of personality emphasised those aspects of personality which are enduring in nature. Among them, following three are main enduring aspects:

• Dynamism

• Personification

• Self-system

Developmental Epochs

Another similarity between Sullivan’s theory and that of Freud’s theory is the belief that childhood experiences determine, to a large degree, the adult personality. And, throughout our childhood, mother plays the most significant role. Unlike Freud, however, he also believed that personality can develop in adolescence and even well into adulthood. He called the stages in his developmental theory Epochs.

He believed that we pass through these stages in a particular order but the timing of such is dictated by our social environment. Much of the focus in Sullivan’s theory revolved around the conflicts of adolescence. As we can see from the chart below, three stages were devoted to this period of development and much of the problems of adulthood, according to Sullivan, arise from the turmoil of our adolescence. Sullivan saw interpersonal development as taking place over seven stages, from infancy to mature adulthood. Personality changes are most likely during transitions between stages.

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