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"THE ILLUSORY OTHER" IS AN attractive term because it suggests at once the inappropriateness of my version of you to what is in fact transpiring between us. Yet it could mislead us in two ways. (1) According to interpersonal theory, it should not stand alone, and (2) the term "illusory" implies that, being a fabrication of the mind, it should be gotten rid of so that something more "real" can take its place. I mention these potential misinterpretations because our common language is still the language of individual psychology. We are prone as was Sullivan to slip into speaking of parataxic distortions as if they were one-way processes rather than speaking of a parataxic dyad. Nevertheless, Sullivan chose to wrestle with the grammar of subject and object in order to go the more rigorous way of trying to apply the philosophy of social behaviorism to the clinical practice of psychiatry.
In his lecture The Data of Psychiatry(1938) Sullivan made it clear that the illusory other is part of a dyad made up as much of my version of myself as it is of my version of the other person. This envelope seems to reduce my anxiety by providing a framework of expectations within which I can be comfortable. To put it in other