THEORY OF HARRY STACK SULLIVAN

HARRY STACK SULLIVAN

Harry Stack-Sullivan focused both on social aspects of personality and cognitive representations. This moved him away from Freud's psychosexual development Sullivan, saw anxiety as existing only as a result of social interactions. He described techniques, much like defense mechanisms, that provide tools for people to use in order to reduce social anxiety.

He developed a model regarding failures in interpersonal relationships as being largely responsible for mental illnesses. In his words, it is the "interactional," not the "intrapsychic, forces that must be studied in order to find the causes, and develop treatments for, even the most severe psychoses. This search for satisfaction via personal involvement with others led Sullivan to characterise loneliness as the most painful of human experiences.

Selective Inattention is one such mechanism. According to Sullivan, mothers show their anxiety about child rearing to their children through various means. Selective inattention is soon learned, and the child begins to interaction that could produce these uncomfortable feelings ignore or reject the anxiety or any interaction that could produce these uncomfortable feelings.


Personifications

Through social interactions and our selective attention or inattention, we develop what Sullivan called Personifications of ourselves and others. While defenses can often help reduce anxiety, they can also lead to a misperception of reality. Again, he shifts his focus away from Freud and more toward a cognitive approach to understanding personality. These personifications are mental images that allow us better understand ourselves and the world.

There are three basic ways we see ourselves that Sullivan called the bad-me, the good-me and the not-me.

The bad me represents those aspects of the self that are considered negative and are therefore hidden from others and possibly even the self. The anxiety that we feel is often a result of recognition of the bad part of ourselves, such as when we recall an embarrassing moment or experience guilt from a past action.

The good me is everything we like about ourselves. It represents the part of us we share with others and that we often choose to focus on because it produces no anxiety. The final part of us, called the not-me, represents all those things that are so anxiety provoking that we can not even consider them a part of us. Doing so would definitely create anxiety which we spend our lives trying to avoid. The not-me is kept out of awareness by pushing it deep into the unconscious.


Modes of Experiencing

All experiences occur in one or more of the three 'modes' presented by Sullivan. These threemodes were: the prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes.


Prototaxic mode

As the Greek roots of this term indicate, the prototaxic mode refers to the first kind of experience the infant has and the order or arrangement in which it occurs. According to Sullivan's hypothesis all that the infant "knóws" are momentary states, the distinction of before and after being a later acquirement. The infant vaguely feels or 'prehends' earlier and later states without realising any rial connection between them. The infant has no awareness of itself as an entity separate from the rest of the world. In other words, its felt experience is all of a piece, undifferentiated, without definite limits. It is as if his experiences were cosmic'.


Parataxic

As the infant develops and maturation proceeds, the original undifferentiated wholeness of experience is broken. The child experiences many things in terms of the 'parts and diverse aspects. The various kinds of experiences are not related or connected in a logical fashion. They just happen' together, or they do not, depending on circumstances.

In other words, various experiences are felt as concomitant, not recognised as connected in an orderly way. The child cannot yet relate them to one another or make logical distinctions among them. What is experienced is assumed to be the natural' way of such occurrences. There is no reflection and comparison by the child about the occurrences.. Since no connection there is no logical movement of thought' from one idea to the next.

Thus the parataxic mode is not a step by step process, but the child experiences everything as momerntary, unconnected states of being.

Syntaxic

As the child grows, itis able to understand the language and gradually learns the consensually validated' meaning of language. That is a particular term means a certain thing whether it is spoken by parents or siblings etc. These meanings have been acquired from group activities, interpersonal activities and social experience. Consensually validated symbol activity involves an appeal to principles which are accepted as true by the hearer. And when this happens, the youngster has acquired or learned the syntaxic mode of experience."


Developmental Epochs

Another similarity between Sullivan's theory and that of Freud's is the belief that childhood experiences determine, to a large degree, the adult personality. And, throughout our childhood, the mother plays the most significant role. 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. His developmental stages are given below in the table.