ABSTRACT

The old paradigm lives on with its old coterie of believers, perhaps making surface adjustments to try to assimilate the new model: a version of old wine in new bottles. I said in The Fallacy of Understanding that Freud represented an energy machine paradigm and that Sullivan represented an information machine model: the steam engine versus the telephone (or, if one prefers a more technologically-sophisticated version, the jet engine versus the computer). A great deal of confusing overlap is possible. As I suggested, one can make "modern" pronouncements masking an anachronistic paradigm (as do some of the Freudians); one can make modernist statements based on a new paradigm, while giving historical lip-service to the old (as do the object-relationship theorists), or one can present an entirely new paradigm with entirely new premises as an overt statement of rebellion (as did R.D. Laing)." Sullivan, I would suggest, did something in between. He presented an entirely fresh perspective based on a communication, or language, paradigm. He quite clearly defined his own participation in new paradigm terms when he openly acknowledged that his theories were an amalgam of many sources of reading and comparison. He had, says Perry, "a growing sense of collective creativity, and an acute awareness of how much one's thoughts and hopes changed dramatically in a new situation with a new person."5 He read widely, borrowed freely, and preempted

sometimes conflicting concepts with only minor modification. He was also sensitive to the ideas of people he had not read, either through hearing them or hearing about them from others. Many of his influences came second-or third-hand. It did not matter, since Sullivan was a control center, a sorter and amalgamator of message. He did not credit, as did Freud (as Perry quotes Freud), "having made a discovery to not being a wide reader .... I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche from a deliberate resolve not to be hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of expectation derived from without."6