Another Look at Sullivan's Concept of Individuality

THE CAREFUL READER CANNOT escape a sense of an intellectual ambivalence in Sullivan's writings, a disturbing ambiguity concerning the themes of self and individuality. Certainly he writes, "We are all more simply human than otherwise, " and in order to be so we are all more alike than otherwise, indeed without uniqueness. Self-generated individuality is an illusion, to Sullivan, and we are each the sum of the reflected appraisals of others. Yet at the same time, it is Sullivan who is able to capture and describe psychological types, or syndromes as he calls them, whose various personalities and pathologies have a vivid and idiosyncratic quality usually expected from a novelist rather than a doctor. These syndromes describe people who are indeed more human than otherwise. And in many respects they have more individuality than those described by the usual psychoanalytic diagnostic categories.

There is, therefore, a paradox at the center of Sullivan's theory of human nature and psychotherapy which lurks in much of his work and can make reading his lectures a puzzling experience. This paradox has been delineated clearly in a paper by Crowley (1973).

Crowley indicates Sullivan rejected that concept of unique individuality which was distorted and neurotic but not that one which was real; this latter Sullivan saw as being beyond the possibility of consensual observation and therefore out of the reach of a scientific psychiatry. Crowley points out that there is no denial of personal individuality as such and so the issue becomes one of definition and methodology. Summarizing Sullivan, he writes:

In theory, individuality is liquidated; in practice, it becomes a goal, in the sense of responding to the real characteristics of another person. A paradox indeed! Sullivan believed that people, in the process of living and becoming persons, have separate and unique career lines. He did not deny a real unique individuality, a real self, to anyone … (but) the traditional,