ABSTRACT
Clara Thompson melded the interpersonal relations of Harry Stack Sullivan with the psychoanalysis of Berlin-trained Erich Fromm to create the initial form of interpersonal psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s. Following Thompson's lead, the first generation of interpersonal writers took issue with the way mainstream psychoanalysts of those days understood human living. They adopted new interpretive schemes, substituting transactional events and patterns in the early family for drive and defense; but they did not challenge the basic conception of psychoanalysis, according to which therapeutic action depended on the interpretive understanding gained by the patient. The truth about one's life was the curative agent, no less for the early interpersonalists than for their Freudian counterparts. It remained for a later generation, notably Edgar Levenson and Benjamin Wolstein in the 1970s and 1980s, to reconceptualize the nature of the clinical task and thereby give the contemporary form of interpersonal psychoanalysis.
