ABSTRACT
Perhaps Harry Stack Sullivan’s most important, fundamental, and neglected contribution was his extraordinary theory of personality, which may be more properly put as his vision of humankind. Whereas great thinkers like Freud, Jung, and Kraepelin oriented their penetrating insights on the functioning of the individual, Sullivan offered a systematic conception of humankind in its social world or context. So central was the interpersonal and social world of humankind that, in his later years, Sullivan (1950a) wrote a highly controversial and disturbing paper entitled “The illusion of personal individuality.” For Sullivan, psychiatry, and all that derived from it, such as treatment and theories of personality, was redefined as the science of interpersonal living, quite radically different from previous psychoanalytic conceptualizations (see Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983). It is the purpose of the next three chapters to give an overview of the main concepts of Sullivan’s interpersonal theory. I will often use the term “interpersonal theory” in place of the usual term of “personality theory” to remind the reader, as did Sullivan, that everything about the person must be placed in an interpersonal context. To develop a deeper understanding of Sullivan’s interpersonal theory, the reader is strongly encouraged to read Sullivan’s primary sources-Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (1940/53), Personal Psychopathology (1972), and, most importantly, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953).
