The Interpersonal Approach

Gerard Chrzanowski: The Interpersonal Approach to Psychoanalysis New York: Gardner Press, 1977.

DR. GERARD CHRZANOWSKI presents a much more clinical survey of Sullivan's ideas, (innovative and incompletely developed as they were), then previous authors (e.g., Green, 1972), . His book lacks the precision of Leston Haven's work which spells out the (albeit limited but nonetheless uniquely valuable) instrumental technique of participant-observation as practiced by Sullivan, and reported in actual cases of Sullivan himself or others whom he closely supervised. However, Dr. Chrzanowski is not so interested in the appreciation of Sullivan's special contribution as he is in appraising the deficiencies and limitations of that contribution; and adding his own modifications, elaborations and present-day research to present Chrzanowski's own theoretical system and clinical practice. This, of course, is a timely and most useful contribution, and high-lights the tragic failure of so many others trained in the Washington School and the White Institute to systematically elaborate the special contributions of Sullivan that have been so influential here and abroad, and to which they are in tremendous debt.

Thus, this short book is appropriately subtitled A Contemporary View of Harry Stack Sullivan and is divided in two parts—the first stating the basic structure and terms of Sullivan's loose, unsystematized theory; and the second describing Chrzanowski's own elaboration in the therapeutic process and its vicissitudes. At the end is included the complete bibliography compiled by Ralph Crowley.

The preface credits Chrzanowski's own and Sullivan's delineation of an interpersonal Self to the pioneering work of Baldwin, Mead and Kurt Lewin. Here Chrzanowski demonstrates the depth psychology of the interpersonal Self in an ecologic frame of reference integrating advanced contemporary research into the interpersonal approach.