General points:

First American to construct a comprehensive personality theory.

He believed that personality does not exist without interpersonal relations.

Healthy development of personality requires the ability to establish intimacy with people.
    Anxiety can interfere with satisfying interpersonal relationships at any age..

Preadolescence is the most important period because intimate relationships are possible without the added complication of lust

Achievement of psychological health comes with the ability to have both intimate and lustful relationship with another person.

Tensions

Personality viewed as an energy system (like Freud and Jung)
Energy can exist as tension or as action.

Sullivan defined tension as potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness.

Needs and anxiety
Needs-potentiality for productive actions
Anxiety-nonproductive or disintegrative actions
 

Needs
Imbalance between biological requirements and current state

Though biological mostly, interpersonal situations also create needs
      The most basic interpersonal need is tenderness which is developed through the infants need to receive tenderness from its primary caregiver (he also discusses general and zonal needs but we will not)

Anxiety
Diffuse, vague and is related to no specific actions for its relief

Originates through empathy with parent-all babies become anxious to some degree
Sullivan said anxiety is like a blow to the head-makes us incapable of learning, impairs memory, narrows perception, and may result in amnesia

Dynamisms: typical behavior patterns that characterize a person throughout a lifetime.
(you will not need to differentiate between the two major classes)
 

 1. Malevolence: evil and hatred (feeling that one is living among one’s enemies) arises because things that the child did earlier to bring on tenderness no longer work and may be met with punishment so child learns to withhold need for tenderness and protect themselves by adopting a malevolent attitude (a vicious circle because parents are then much less likely to give tenderness).

 2. Intimacy: grows from need for tenderness but involves a close personal relationship between two people who are more of less of equal status.

 Tenderness refers to good feelings surrounding interpersonal relationships with anyone (mother, father, siblings, friends, or pets.

Intimacy refers to tender feelings one person has for an equal.
Intimacy involves a close relationship between two persons who must react to each other in the give and take of close collaboration.  Differs from sexual interest (develops before puberty)

3. Lust: an autoerotic phenomenon since it requires no other person for its satisfaction.

4. Self-System: most complex dynamism which includes behaviors that maintain our interpersonal security by protecting us from anxiety by learning which behaviors increase or decrease anxiety.  Main tools are called security operations (dissociation [denial-these feelings then influence the individual VIA the unconscious and may manifest themselves in dreams or unintentional activities] and selective inattention [less extreme than dissociation and still allows awareness])

Personifications: learned images of ourselves and others.
 

 1. Bad-Mother, Good Mother

 2. Me Personifications:

Bad-me personification-from punishment and disapproval (infant can only learn that it is bad from someone else)

Good-me personification: results from reward and approval

Not-me: results from sudden severe anxiety (dissociates or selective inattention)

3. Eidetic Personifications: imaginary playmates invented to protect self-esteem-may carry through to adulthood in the form of “projection” of traits remaining from previous relationships

Levels of Cognition
~ways of perceiving, imagining, and conceiving
 

Protoaxic-impossible to communicate

Parataxic-personal, prelogical, and communicated only in distorted form

Syntaxic-meaningful interpersonal communication

Stages of Development (skip because we are going to go into Erikson’s stages of development in depth as they are far more accepted)

Biographical Information

Ironically, his own relationships were not good.
As child he experienced at least one schizophrenic episode
As an adult his relationships were superficial and ambivalent
Mother pampered and protected him because she had lost 2 children within a year of birth prior to Sullivan
Mother was gone for 2 years (possible mental hospital) from age 3 to 5 and he effectively had 3 mother figures in his life (mother, grandmother, and aunt
In preschool he had neither friends nor acquaintances
Sullivan never married and had a close relationship that might have been homosexual regardless of the exact nature of the relationship it likely contributed to the importance Harry placed on intimacy.