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The authors, by their own reckoning, present as complete an account of Sullivan's work as has ever been written. Sullivan wrote very little and his views have, therefore, been gleaned largely from his lectures in the 1930s and 1940s. He is something of a force majeure in American psychotherapeutic circles, I believe, where contemporary depth psychology has largely classical Freudian antecedents and no less determined abreactants. Among the latter are the Sullivanians.
The cornerstone of Sullivan's work is interpersonal relations, and stages of childhood development are demarcated according to their characteristic patterns of relating. The fact is, Sullivan developed a badly neglected area at a time when psychoanalysis in America centred on the analysis of the Oedipus conflict and the ego psychologists were just beginning to think about object relations and other ego functions, amid much outcry from their colleagues. Jung, at that time, was concerned with the great universal patterns which were, however, found to originate deep within the psyche. In England, Melanie Klein and her followers were likewise discovering emotionally laden ‘stories’ in the recesses of the infantile mind, deepening psychoanalytic understanding of early inner development in relation to the mother. In that context Sullivan was the high priest of the observable, day-to-day relationship patterns. Perhaps he anticipated our current emphasis on infant observation, and on the analyst's convictions derived from the transference/countertransference. But he would not, or could not, take the externals any further and believe in the reality of the intangibles beneath.
Earliest infancy is considered by him to be a time of life which is not interpersonal (it is ‘autistic’), and therefore ‘a seamless blur of sensations’.
The infant has no sense of time or space or of himself as something separate from his environment. He also has no sense of the relatedness of things; nothing has clear connections, or separat