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SULLIVAN, THE FATHER OF INTERPERSONAL PSYCHIATRY, died in 1949 at the age of 57. He left a most valuable legacy, his creative
conceptions which, in the intervening years, have not been done complete justice. They have lost their impetus for a number of reasons. There have been at least two major developments which have stunted the growth of his ideas, independently of some of their inherent weaknesses, contradictions, and the incompleteness of his contributions. For one, the interpersonal model has become an integral part of modern psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic thought and practice on conscious and unconscious levels. It no longer stands out as the radical approach it once was, arousing our attention to explore it in depth. Interpersonal processes are now viewed either as peripheral, superficial phenomena, by some, or as primary manifestations, by others. Interpersonal events are either treated as the one and only meaningful source of psychological data, or as necessary evils which only distract from the "real" task. And in a similar vein, an artificial dichotomy is maintained between prevailing constructs of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. This leads to an unfortunate system in which two semantic categories are created, each one to explain what is supposedly the sum of human behavior, internal in contrast to external processes. The result, unfortunately, is an inadequate awareness on the part of the behavior scientist of the dynamic interplay between two dimensions of one unified system. These two factors have complicated the essential task of teaching Sullivan and interpersonalism as one significant dimension of a viable clinical approach to "difficulties in living" (Sullivan's phrase).
There are other factors which furt