Some Notes on Participant Observation

A YOUNG DOCTORAL STUDENT WHO was writing his thesis on Participant Observation learned that I had worked with Sullivan and asked me what I believed the term meant. The first thought that came to mind was of the character in the play who discovered that all his life he had been speaking prose. In a sense, to the student of interpersonal relations, the term is a redundancy. I trust I can clarify this.

Only forty years ago, most analysts thought that instincts acted on people, and were the root of mental pathology. Sullivan believed it was people acting on people that induced anxiety, and then elucidated the roles of 'significant others' in the development of the individual from infancy on. He studied his own role as psychiatrist in communicating with others, and his observations led naturally to the concept of the analyst as a 'significant other' who not only observed but participated. To him, personality handicaps were due to the presence of anxiety and the lacks in experience. The results of his work with schizophrenics and obsessional compulsives were impressive, and furnished clinical proof of his theory of anxiety, with the therapist as a 'significant other'. The kind of person he was, how and when and what he said and did, were directly related to favorable outcome in treatment and living.

The preponderant view at that time saw the therapist as a pure observer, or 'blank screen', and the patient as the one who 'free associates'. The therapist would make himself as anonymous as possible, remaining removed, distant and detached, at least in theory, lest he influence these free associations. Sullivan, who perceived the situation as an interpersonal field, would say that this orthodox posture was a particular way of participating in a relationship that would have its own effect on what transpired. Thus, no matter that the therapist saw himself as pure observer, he was always a participant in a relationship, for better or worse. This was the nature of thing