Harry Stack Sullivan Quotes

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.

There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck".

New Beat Books, 2016. Kindle. Sullivan, Harry Stack, and Helen Swick Perry.

NED: I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men.

Hepimiz çevremizin bizim hakkımızdaki değerlendirmeleri doğrultusunda bir “benlik algısı” geliştiririz. Sosyalleştikçe kişiliğimizi, anlayışlarımızı geliştirerek “kendimiz” oluruz. (Harry Stack Sullivan “Interpersonal Theory”)

Sullivan discussed two other ways to cope with the anxiety about sexual performance that emerged in early adolescence. First, the adolescent could withdraw from attempts to meet both lust and intimacy through social isolation. The isolated adolescent used reverie (daydreams, phantasies, and dreams) as a substitution for interpersonal experience. While such methods could be initially useful, the isolated adolescent could eventually retreat permanently into the safety of this method of need discharge. Changes could occur in the reverie process, creating highly idealized, imaginary companions which posed a severe barrier to meeting others, while making it difficult to break down obstacles in reaching out to real and imperfect intimate others, leading to what Sullivan called the schizoid problem. Second, if the lust dynamism appeared before the adolescent achieved isophilic intimacy, the chronic juvenile pattern led to a need to be envied and a competitive, non-intimate stance regarding lust manifested itself as being, in the juvenile male adolescent, a Don Juan or ladies' man or, in the juvenile female adolescent, a "teaser.

He never engaged in speculation on the effect of heredity versus environment. Testing intelligence of a child by devices contrived by a more advanced denizen of another culture-complex made no sense to him. Time enough to look at the variables of heredity after the child had been freed from the crippling effects of poverty, restricting custom, limited schooling, accidents of geography, and the environing stereotypes.

If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate in a variety of ways. Since you have to protect your feeling of personal worth by noting how unworthy everybody around you is, you are not provided with any data that are convincing evidence of your having personal worth; so it gradually evolves into 'I am not as bad as the other swine.' To be the best of swine, when it would be nice to be a person, is not a particularly good way of furthering anything except security operations. When security is achieved that way, it strikes at the very roots of that which is essentially human — the utterly vital role of interpersonal relations.

PARANOID PERSONALITY The paranoid defense is a posture developed to cope with excessive shame. The paranoid person becomes hypervigilant, expecting and waiting for the betrayal and humiliation he knows is coming. The paranoid person interprets innocent events as personally threatening and constantly lives on guard. Harry Stack Sullivan described the paranoid as “feeling hopelessly defective.” The sources of the paranoid’s own sense of deficiency are found elsewhere. It’s as if the inner eyes of shaming, contempt and disdain are projected outward. Wrongdoings, mistakes and other instances of personal failure cannot be owned by the paranoid-type personality. They are disowned and transferred from the inner self to others.

Every therapy session belongs to both patient and therapist, to the interaction between them. It was the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan who, in the early twentieth century, developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships. Breaking away from Freud’s position that mental disorders were intrapsychic in origin (meaning “in one’s mind”), Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”). He went so far as to say, “It’s the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office.” We can’t teach patients to be relational if we aren’t relational with them.