Biography of Sullivana Harry

A few years after receiving medical education and participation in the First World War, he became a psychiatrist and achieved success in this area. Its first leader was V. White - a well -known neuropsychiatrist in the Washington hospital of St. White’s psychiatric institution in New York, where Sullivan has been the president for ten years, and to this day continues the tradition of Sullivan and E.

Fromm, their principles and methods. Along with psychiatric practice and work in the clinic, Sullivan gave lectures on psychiatry in the USA and abroad, worked in UNESCO, studied factors affecting international tension, was interested in mental health problems, published a psychiatry magazine. All this took him a lot of time and interfered with the design of his thoughts. Therefore, the lectures recorded by the students and colleagues of Sullivan compiled one single volume of his works, which represent the interpersonal theory as an integral system.

Woodworth writes that Sullivan’s contribution to therapeutic technique was very significant. Many of his work were performed on the basis of observations of patients with schizophrenia - and this is at a time when medicine did not yet know the methods that brought schizophrenics closer to human status in communication. After a certain period of samples and errors, Sullivan’s ideas show off about the importance of the interview, which provides for an interpersonal situation.

The interview doctor should actively observe what the patient does, how and what he says, but at the same time not to allow his own invasion of the patient’s mental processes, not to impose his distortions or personifications to him, which may bring the patient to a state of elective inattention. It contrasts with the objective role of the therapist, which was represented in Freud's theory.

Wells considers Sullivan one of the leading psychoanalysts-reformers. Having discarded Freudian terminology, he developed his own, which makes his works obscure for the uninitiated. He applies the “cultural model” of interpersonal relations as a means of establishing compulsive dynamism, which supposedly determines mental activity. Such basic concepts of psychoanalysis as unconscious motivation, censorship, oppression and catharsis follow precisely from its “interpersonal” prerequisites.

He completely abandoned the concept of innate forces or needs, maintaining interpersonal relationships the basis of his psychoanalytic theory. In his opinion, the child develops the compulsive mechanisms necessary to establish contact with the social environment. They subsequently form the basis of one or another structure of the character of an adult. The consciousness of the mature individual is based on the unconscious mechanisms of the “I”, the so -called self -disemeters, and resists any threat, wherever it came, including from a psychoanalyst.

According to Sullivan, human consciousness is likened to perceive the driver on a dark night. The headlights of his car are aimed only at a part of the landscape, although if the driver wants to, he can illuminate the rest that was not perceived before, or, speaking in Freud terms, was in the field of the pre -knowledge. But behind the car lies complete darkness, which cannot be lit by any maneuvers of the driver.

Here are hidden motivational systems or complexes that are in a state of dissociation. They appear discharged in dreams, mistakes, fantasies and in relations to other people. Without such discharge, disintegration of personality would take place as a result of unbearable pressure from unconscious motivation. Drawing this picture, which copies the Freudian model, Sullivan believes that it depends on interpersonal relationships, the individual will reveal his real integrated “I” or not.

What we think about ourselves depends on what others thought about us during the years of the formation of our personality. All internal in person, thus, is taken from the history of his communication with other people. He makes adjustments to the theory of classical Freudism. Even the method of therapy he proposed radically different from Freudovsky. Libido is not included in his system, sex is considered in its narrow sense, although it affects the mental development of the individual from early adolescence.

Oedipus complex is reduced to the effect that affects the child in relation to power behavior by the parents of the same floor with him. Sullivan emphasizes the social aspect of development, although it does not ignore the biological factor. His theory concerning the “I-system” reflects the influence of J. Foreign Ministry, as well as the anthropological concepts of R. Benedict and E.

The basic principles of the interpersonal theory of G. Sullivan, the main object of psychiatric detection of neurosis and psychoses, should not be the mental structure of the mind, personality, etc. The development and functioning of cognitive processes in a person are represented in three forms: prototaxis, parataxis and parathysis and parathysis, and parathysis and parathysis.

syntax. The prototaxis is an unrelated “stream of consciousness”, a series of individual, disordered and inorganized sensations, emotions, images.It is characteristic of babies, adults experience it in dreams and in altered states of consciousness. Parataxis records the causal connections of events taking place at the same time, but not necessarily interconnected.

Superstition and prejudice are based on parataxis. Like a prototaxis, this is an archaic form of thinking available in animals. Syntax is a specifically human form of organization of experience based on the use of language symbols. It contains logical connections, generally accepted meanings. The first interpersonal attitude arises between the child and the mother. Hence the first children's reactions to the social environment.

Calming after birth, good feeding, heat, euphoria are periodically interrupted by unpleasant sensations, such as hunger, cold, pain, etc. tension arises, but euphoria is restored when the child’s needs are adequately satisfied. This is something like the Freudian principle of pleasure-the most desired state of being, free from excitement. According to the interpersonal theory, if the mother is in suspense, taking care of the child, this situation is directly associated with the phenomenon of empathy “in sensation”.

This term has its own history in psychology. In particular, T. Lips denoted them our attitude to works of art or understanding the feelings of other people based on kinesthetic sensations that arise when we consciously or unconsciously adopt the pose of likening. In other words, empathy is an expression of intuition regarding the feelings of other people, although in this sense the term loses a certain scientific accuracy.

Sullivan was not interested in the mechanisms of empathy as its effector manifestations. The first effect of the impact on the child is to draw him into a tense state and thus deprive him of satisfaction, which could come to him through feeding, hugs, etc. at first, the source of frustration cannot be recognized as a personal or characteristic feature of the child's environment.

Gradually, through the tension of various experiments, the child learns a certain culture in which it develops, knowing the abilities and its environment as a whole. The child makes the discovery that with a delay in satisfying his needs, he can diminish the meaning for him of “other” people. That is, the provision of need for people is assessed to such an extent as to give preference to the tension that is easier to withstand and which is temporarily related to the dissatisfaction of physical needs to a greater extent than increased anxiety due to social instability.

Here you can find a parallel between the interpersonal theory and the Freudian compromise between the "Ida" and "ego". However, Freud understood a compromise as a way of using libido, while Sullivan explains it with a hypothesis of personal dynamism. Personal dynamism and self in the theories of K. Jung and A. Adler were already present by the concept of self, although with his differences.

But the general was that it was about certain connections within the body itself. Without denying this, Sullivan, however, chose to interpret the self as a system of habits that characterize the interpersonal reactions of the individual. Fear that arises in a state of tension teaches him to distinguish the approved and unchanged behavior. In this regard, the child develops such methods of behavior that are designed for confidence in the greatest provision of his needs.

If the child acts in accordance with social requirements, the “positive-for-person” is controlled by him. If he violates the rules, “negative-for-paces” subordinates his fear. The third personification-“non-for-reptile” arises with the aim of carrying out the children's experience of terror or disgust, which allows you to enter into communication without unbearable fear. In addition, the “I-system” contains other behaviors that develop from the part of the “I” with which the individual can enter into communication without a sense of fear, and also develop through the mediation of training and interests, and do not have the necessary connection with the need to avoid fear.

Methods of experimenting an epistemological problem, that is, the question of how we understand ourselves in relation to the environment, has always been difficult for both psychologists and philosophers. Freud answered this question in terms of interaction between primary and secondary processes. Sullivan described more than explained. He identified three methods of experience that are realized successfully, but, once arising, continue to act under certain circumstances at the levels where the highest method of action takes the place of each of the previous ones.

The easiest way - prototaxis - characterizes the earliest, disordered and unorganized experience of the child. This experience is the world of the child. He still has no idea about time and space, so he cannot successfully organize events and objects. His experience consists of isolated, irrelevant intellectual states, in which there is neither an object nor a subject.This separation occurs later.

In its “oceanic” character, this prototactic experience has something in common with the Freudian primary process. Piaget used similar facts for the scientific reconstruction of the early experience of the child. Gradually, the world of the child begins to acquire the features of organization. The child realizes, for example, that certain sounds are a friendly voice of the mother or her steps - they promise the fast and sweetest of all the objects - her chest, a bottle of milk and the like.

Another sound is a signal of the joyful appearance of a good friend - a dog. Based on this sequence, the child begins to foresee events and explain them. If “B” occurs after “A”, “B” is interpreted as the result of the latter - the form of thought that Harry Sullivan calls unrealistic. But the child in this way begins to apply the language of symbols to certain objects and to people.

He opens that the extraction of certain sounds can achieve dominance over the mother, and with the help of others they themselves can be neglected. He also learns that certain signals cannot be constantly dependent on his action. His hopes are not always realized in a parataxic way, because they have a “special meaning” to a greater extent than the “sequential meaning” of the previous syntactic method.

At the following levels that the child reaches, applying the logical means of reasoning, resulting in general relations, he realizes that other people can agree with his point of view and that communication with others on this basis is easier and calmer. However, even after the achievement of this stage of development and prolonged use of coordinated and reasonable symbols, some individuals can degrade mentally, without realizing the parataxic method of action.