An Interpersonal Perspective: The Analyst's Unwitting Participation in the Patient's Change

Harry Stack Sullivan was the American “psychoanalytic pioneer” who shifted the emphasis from drive discharge to interpersonal relations as the basic building block of human personality development. He is not unique, in that most deviation from the basic classical Freudian position has always rotated around that same issue (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). As more early psychoanalytic correspondence gets published, it is clear that Ferenczi, in particular, was a major forerunner of both interpersonal theory and the British school of object relations. However, it is evident that Jung, Adler, and Rank also broke with Freud around the fundamental question of the primacy of sexual and aggressive drives. In the more modern era, object relations theorists and self psychologists both pay significantly less attention to drives and more exclusive attention to the patients historical and current relationships with others and the internalization of those relational configurations (Mitchell, 1988).

Interpersonal psychoanalysis, for many, is associated with Sullivan and has probably been the most criticized or ignored of the modern developments in psychoanalysis. For one, Sullivan's interpersonal psychoanalysis is the only significant orientation which was not initiated by an analyst who was initially classically trained, and this lack of credential has always hurt his credibility as well as that of the interpersonal school in total. In addition, many have believed that his theory of development gives short shrift to the intrapsychic world of the individual and that Sullivan's only interest was in the observable relations among people. Some have construed him to be too positivistic, a variation of American behavioral psychology. This impression has some basis, though others have found clear reference to an internalized self in his writing (e.g., his concept of personifications). It is this concept that forms the basis for unconscious motivation. Regardless of whether or not Sullivan h