I am relieved to have been asked to discuss the relationship between the “intrapsychic” and the “interpersonal” from a Sullivanian perspective, rather than the Sullivanian perspective, since Sullivan's work lends itself to many different readings, and various contemporary writers of often dramatically different points of view all identify themselves as interpersonalists and/or Sullivanians. Therefore, I would like to abandon at the start the claim that the following paper is representative in any sense. Rather, I have two more modest goals: first, to consider the manner in which Sullivan himself might have thought about the relation between the “intrapsychic” and the “interpersonal,” to reconstruct the context and internal logic of his approach; and second, to consider this question through more contemporary interpersonal eyes, my own, taking advantage of the hindsight which nearly 40 years of psychoanalytic thinking has provided since Sullivan's death.

The immediate and quite serious problem in establishing