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Chisholm, R., The First Person. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
Weiss, P., You, I, and The Others. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.
ANY ONE DEFINABLE INTERPERSONAL RELATION, in so far as it reflects what goes on at all between persons, derives from the psychic activities involving at least two first persons with one another. In the dynamics of psychic experience, it takes at least two first persons to make one interpersona. The cogent and coherent study of interpersonal relations, then, requires the orderly and unambiguous inclusion of the subject matter of the two books under review. For our clinical psychoanalytic inquiry, whenever it concerns the manifestations of the persona—but, of course, always engaging far more of the psyche than its persona—has to deal with the first, the second, and the third persons, in the singular and the plural, as both subject and object. Language is, clearly, a medium of communication, and communication a medium of psychic experience; so while the analysis of unconscious psychic experience cannot, obviously, be reduced to the study of language, it also cannot, on the other hand, be communicated without some form of symbolic representation, including that of language. In these terms do The First Person, by Prof. R. Chisholm, and You, I, and the Others, by Prof. P. Weiss, suggest some general lines along which we may now consider extending Sullivan's conceptions of modern psychiatry, in order to assure the psychological adequacy of his interpersonal-operationist perspective. I am, here, paying particular attention to the interpersonal perspective, as first constructed during the 1930s by Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, Schachtel, Sullivan,