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V. C. Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives Indigenous to North America, Harry Stack Sullivan (1953, 1964) viewed psychiatry as fundamentally the study of interpersonal relations, he developed a very different conception of the self and its development, than his classical psychoanalytic colleagues. Sullivan, greatly influenced by George Herbert Mead (1934), believed we can only know ourselves in relation to an other and thus made the radical assertion that the self was actually just a collection of the reflected appraisals of those we were in contact with, consisting of a set of what he termed, “me-you” patterns (Sullivan, 1953). For Sullivan there was no way to understand an individual self outside the complex network of interpersonal relationships in which a person is inevitably enmeshed. One consequence of this “field theory” perspective was his firm belief that the feeling of an inner core of self was a narcissistically invested fiction. In fact, Sullivan viewed human beings as having “as many personalities as they have interpersonal relations” (1950, p 221). For him, our selves were divided into the “good-me”, that which I like about myself, the “bad-me”, that which I dislike, and the “not-me”, aspects of self so anxiety-provoking that they need to be disavowed by means of dissociation. Sullivan’s view of the self as multiple along with his invocation of self-preservative dissociative processes has forming the leading edge of contemporary relational views of the self best exemplified in the work of Philip Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) and Donnell Stern (1997, 2010). Sullivan developed the concept of the “self-system” to elucidate the configuration of personality traits and security operations designed to maintain an individual’s relative sense of safety and stability. This “self-system” is designed to protect a person from undo shame and anxiety by employing mechanisms such as dissociation and selective inattention. Sullivan’s emphasis on the “other” as a source of danger is consonant with contemporary interpersonal, two person psychology perspectives. Following in the Sullivanian tradition of a field theory perspective, Bromberg ( 1998) views the mind as “a configuration of shifting, non-linear states of consciousness in an ongoing dialectic with the necessary illusion of unitary selfhood.” (p. 7). Following Sullivan, Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) sees “not-me” experiences as ubiquitous and inevitable and claims that dissociative processes can be a healthy, adaptive function of the human mind serving a primary self-protective function akin to Freud’s repression , or Sullivan’s self-system . Thus for Bromberg, “the self” is definitionally a collection of “me” and disavowed “not me” states. As some degree of dissociation is inevitable, Bromberg emphasizes that it is the degree of dissociation amongst the self-states that determines the level of psychopathology with the most extreme examples constituting psychotic experiences. The contemporary relational field theory view of the self has implications for understanding interactions. For Bromberg and other contemporary relational thinkers (e.g. D.B. Stern, E. Levenson) an interaction between two selves involves a complex, ever shifting interweaving of both conscious and unconscious elements that affect and are affected by one another. For Bromberg, successful treatment involves the recognition of these dissociated self- states as they are enacted in the analytic relationship so that they can be re-organized by the patient. Bromberg (1998) views health as the capacity of our multiple self-states to access one another, unhampered by defensively determined dissociative processes. This capacity, which
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