ABSTRACT
The immediate and quite serious problem in establishing Sullivan's view of the relation between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal is that, although he characterized his own position as "interpersonal" and used that term often, he have found no evidence of any written or spoken statement by him on the "intrapsychic" as such. Conversely, the intrapsychic position is sometimes caricatured as a naive constitutionalism holding that the constituents of mind are simply generated by the unfolding of inborn ideas, with no awareness that human beings are sensitive to and influenced by their social environment, past and present. Abrams and Shengold contrast the view of the analytic situation as an "encounter" with the view of the analytic situation as an examination of intrapsychic processes. From the interpersonal point of view, there is no examination of intrapsychic processes except as they are transformed and in a sense uniquely created in the encounter with the analyst.
