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SULLIVAN DEFINED PSYCHIATRY as the study of interpersonal relations. Although he regarded it as having relevance to a science of man, he believed it could not constitute alone a science of man. Nor did he feel that psychiatry could be scientific without the addition of the other social and behavioral sciences. He wrote quite clearly.
the elucidation of the fundamental characteristics of interpersonal relations ("personality processes") in the form of scientific laws requires the extended collaboration of investigators along many approaches (1964a, p. 28).
For the social sciences to be scientific, what psychiatry has learned is particularly useful, especially that body of information learned from the study of schizophrenic ways of life (1949, pp. 194–195). In fact, Sullivan might have preferred his point of view to be described as an approach to the sciences of human living, thus emphasizing process and change.
By defining psychiatry as the study of interpersonal relations, Sullivan regarded psychiatry as an expanding science concerned with the kinds of events and processes in which the psychiatrist participates while being an observant psychiatrist (1953, p. 13). But what can the psychiatrist observe? Only activity in the public mode can be observed, and that part of activity in the private mode that is communicable and thus made observable. Such activity consists of events in interpersonal fields which include the psychiatrist. Sullivan believed that activity that is inviolably