Interpersonal Relations without Individuality

AS COMMENTARY on Dr. Ralph Crowley's very balanced, carefully stated review of Sullivan's critique of the notion of unique individuality, I call attention to a long-neglected, unsolved problem in the interpersonal perspective. Dating back at least twenty-five years, that problem has at least two noteworthy aspects: (1) the absence of individuality from interpersonal relations and (2) the diagnosis of unique individuality as delusion.

(1) While it is false, as Dr. Crowley indicates, to propose that Sullivan "denied the existence or the reality of the unique individual, " it is, nonetheless, true that he nowhere affirmed its existence and reality as part of the study of interpersonal relations, either. For, as Dr. Crowley continues, "He believed and stated that there was no way to study it, by the methods of science …" By so construing both the methods of science and the uniqueness of individual human psyches as mutually exclusive, however, his is clearly an interpersonal relations without individuality.

In Conceptions, Sullivan was very emphatic about it: "The unique individuality of the other fellow need never concern us as scientists. It is a great thing in our wives and our children." As though to say that what goes on between us and our wives and our children is outside his study of interpersonal relations and, therefore, need never concern us as scientists. Perhaps