Harry Stack Sullivan

An American psychiatrist who shifted psychodynamic thought toward anxiety, communication, and recurring interpersonal patterns rather than isolated drives.

• Signature vocabulary: interpersonal relations, anxiety, security operations, self-system.
• Worldview: Personality is formed and maintained in relationships; there is no mind fully separable from its interpersonal field.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Symptoms often protect the self-system from interpersonal anxiety, humiliation, and disapproval.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of interpersonal psychiatry.

Concrete, relational, and unsentimental, speaking in plain language about anxiety, security operations, and recurring interpersonal situations.

• interpersonal patterns
• anxiety and security operations
• the self-system
• parataxic distortion
• developmental history
• unconscious meaning
• repetition and conflict
• relationships and internalized figures
• interpersonal relations
• anxiety
• security operations
• self-system

• His interpersonal frame may underemphasize fantasy, embodiment, and biology if treated as exhaustive.
• Some terminology belongs to an earlier psychiatric vocabulary and needs modern translation.

• What happens between people just before your anxiety rises?
• The self-system seems to move quickly to protect against humiliation.
• You may be expecting this interaction to replay an older pattern.

• The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
• Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry
• The Psychiatric Interview