Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Interpersonal psychoanalysis evolved as an early critique of Freudian drive theory and insistence that interpersonal relations, lived out in social and cultural context from the beginning of life, must be integrated into psychoanalytic theory to account for the origins, development, and “warping” of the personality. As will be seen in this chapter, among its many threads is Harry Stack Sullivan's integration of social science and psychiatry and its transformation into psychoanalysis by Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm, and masterfully altered and extended by Edgar Levenson, providing the emergence of a radically new perspective on the social animal and psychoanalysis. Interpersonal psychoanalysis provides an essential backdrop for contemporary American psychoanalysis. Sullivan's developmental theory looks at how we become human through the sensorimotor organization of experience in interaction, facilitating or hindering the skills and social cognition necessary to live successfully among others in the cultural milieu. Interpersonal psychoanalysis looks at what we do with one another in the consulting room, and how we communicate through words, gestures, and symbols, consciously and unconsciously. It is a two-person intersubjective psychology, which speaks to development and pathology, and provides a unique therapeutic method for the amelioration of difficulties in living.