Individuality: Present but not a Concept1

DR. KLENBORT PRESENTS A THOUGHTFUL and searching discussion of Sullivan on the themes of self and individuality. She makes the important point that Sullivan's writings convey an ambiguity about individuality, as if present yet not accounted for. Thus, while Sullivan was committed to the exclusion of individuality, both from interpersonal theory and from the practice of psychiatry, he nevertheless makes reference to the unique in man, and does not hesitate to offer his own unique characterizations of man's difficulties in living. In pursuing the question of why Sullivan did not allow for the unique within his general theory Dr. Klenbort comes to the conclusion that, finally, he assigned overriding importance to adaptive (my italics) consensual validation.

I believe this is a telling and basic understanding. In essence, interpersonal theory concerns itself with the processes that underlie and generate one's adaptive or maladaptive adjustment to the interpersonal and cultural surround. In other words, the metatheory of interpersonal theory is that appropriate adaptation to the external world is valuable, indeed essential, in order to ensure social and psychological well-being. Sullivan put it this way at one point.

"It is necessary in the modification of activity in the interest of power in interpersonal relations—including … thought—that one focus, as it were, one's interest into certain fields that work. It is in learning this process that the self is evolved and the instrumentality of anxiety comes into being" (1947, p. 9).

Given this orientation, it is not surprising that Sullivan neglected those aspects of human nature (or, in other words, a conceptualization of human nature) that were not related to one's consensually validated standing in the environing culture. Whatever might be unique was simply useless or irrelevant to a psychiatry emphatically concerned with studying in operational terms, and promoting in operational terms, more effective social adjustm