ABSTRACT
The Interpersonal psychoanalytic literature, present since the writings of Harry Stack Sullivan in the early 1940s, was largely ignored or scorned by the then hegemonic classical Freudian and Ego-Psychological perspectives in the USA and was unknown to the respective Middle School and Kleinian and Object-Relations traditions. Sullivan's first most radical departure from the hegemonic European imported Freudian Ego-Psychology of his and later eras was a rejection of Freudian drive theory as a way of understanding the essence of human personality development. Perhaps of equal importance to his radical shift in efforts to understand human development, Sullivan's implicit embrace of the models of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty and American psychology's field theory situated the analyst in the position of a subjective co-participant in the analytic dyad. In contrast, the Interpersonal tradition is biased toward viewing adult patients as adults, independent of how well or poorly they are functioning in the world.
