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Social Psychological Theories:

Adler, Fromm, Homey, and Sullivan T he psychoanalytic theories of personality formulated by Freud and Jung were nurtured by the same positivistic climate that shaped the course of nineteenth century physics and biology. Man was regarded primarily as a complex energy system which maintains itself by means of transactions with the external world. The ultimate purposes of these transactions are individual survival, propagation of the species, and an ongoing evolutionary de- velopment. The various psychological processes that constitute the personality serve these ends. According to the evolutionary doctrine some personalities are better fitted than others to perform these tasks.

Consequently, the concept of variation and the distinction between ad- justment and maladjustment conditioned the thinking of the early psy- choanalysts. Even academic psychology was swept into the orbit of Darwinism and became preoccupied with the measurement of indi- vidual differences in abilities and with the adaptive or functional value of psychological processes.

At the same time, other intellectual trends which were at variance with a purely biophysical conception of man were beginning to take shape. During the later years of the nineteenth century, sociology and anthropology began to emerge as independent disciplines and their rapid growth during the present century has been phenomenal.

While sociologists studied man living in a state of advanced civiliza- tion and found him to be a product of his class and caste, his insti- 114 Social Psychological Theories 115 tutions and folkways, anthropologists ventured into remote areas of the world where they found evidence that human beings are almost infinitely malleable. According to these new social sciences, man is chiefly a product of the society in which he lives. His personality is social rather than biological.

Gradually, these burgeoning social and cultural doctrines began to seep into psychology and psychoanalysis and to erode the nativistic and physicalistic foundations of these sciences. A number of followers of Freud who became dissatisfied with his myopia regarding the so- cial conditioners of personality withdrew their allegiance from clas- sical psychoanalysis and began to refashion psychoanalytic theory along lines dictated by the new orientation developed by the social sciences. Among those who provided psychoanalytic theory with the twentieth century look of social psychology are the four people whose ideas form the content of the present chapter—Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Of these four, Al- fred Adler may be regarded as the ancestral figure of the "new social psychological look" because as early as 1911 he broke with Freud over the issue of sexuality, and proceeded to develop a theory in which social interest and a striving for superiority became two of its most substantial conceptual pillars. Later, Horney and Fromm took up the cudgels against the strong instinctivist orientation of psychoanalysis and insisted upon the relevance of social psychological variables for personality theory. Finally, Harry Stack Sullivan in his theory of in- terpersonal relations consolidated the position of a personality theory grounded in social processes. Although each of the theories has its own distinctive assumptions and concepts, there are numerous paral- lels among them which have been pointed out by various writers (James, 1947; Ruth Munroe, 1955; and H. L. and R. R. Ansbacher, 1956).

Our choice of the major figure for this chapter, Harry Stack Sul- livan, is dictated primarily by our belief that he brought his ideas to a higher level of conceptualization and consequently has been a more pervasively influential theorist. Sullivan was considerably more inde- pendent of prevailing psychoanalytic doctrines; although he earlier used the Freudian framework, in his later work he developed a theo- retical system which deviated markedly from the Freudian one.

He was profoundly influenced by anthropology and social psychology.

Both Horney and Fromm, on the other hand, kept well within the province of psychoanalysis in their thinking; Adler, although a sepa- ratist from the Freudian school, continued to show the impact of his 116 Theories of Personality early association with Freud throughout his life. Homey and Fromm are usually referred to as revisionists or neo-Freudians. Neither of them engaged in developing a new theory of personality; rather they regarded themselves as renovators and elaboraters of an old theory.

Sullivan was much more of an innovator. He was a highly original thinker who attracted a large group of devoted disciples and devel- oped what is sometimes called a new school of psychiatry.

ALFRED ADLER Alfred Adler was born in Vienna in 1870 of a middle-class family and died in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1937 while on a lecture tour.

He received a medical degree in 1895 from the University of Vienna.

At first he specialized in ophthalmology and then, after a period of prac- tice in general medicine, he became a psychiatrist. He was one of the charter members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and later its president. However, Adler soon began to develop ideas which were at variance with those of Freud and others in the Vienna So- ciety, and when these differences became acute he was asked to pre- sent his views to the society. This he did in 1911 and as a conse- quence of the vehement criticism and denunciation of Adler's posi- tion by other members of the society, Adler resigned as president and a few months later terminated his connection with Freudian psycho- analysis (Colby, 1951; Jones, 1955; H. L. and R. R. Ansbacher, 1956).

He then formed his own group, which came to be known as In- dividual Psychology and which attracted followers throughout the world. During the First World War, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian army and after the war he became interested in child guidance and established the first guidance clinics in connection with the Viennese school system. He also inspired the establishment of an experimental school in Vienna which applied his theories of edu- cation.

In 1935 Adler settled in the United States where he continued his practice as a psychiatrist and served as Professor of Medical Psy- chology at the Long Island College of Medicine. Adler was a pro- lific writer and published a hundred books and articles during his lifetime. The practice and theory of individual psychology (1927) is probably the best introduction to Adler's theory of personality- Shorter digests of Adler's views appear in the Psychologies of 1930 (1930) and in the International Journal of Individual Psychology (1935).

Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher recently edited and anno- Social Psychological Theories 117 tated an extensive selection of passages from Adler's writings (1956) which is the best single source of information about Adler's Indi- vidual Psychology. Phyllis Bottome has written a book-length biog- raphy of Adler (1939). Adler's ideas are promulgated in the United States by the American Society of Individual Psychology with branches in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and through its journal, The American Journal of Individual Psychology.

In sharp contrast to Freud's major assumption that man's behavior is motivated by inborn instincts and Jung's principal axiom that man's conduct is governed by inborn archetypes, Adler assumed that man is motivated primarily by social urges. Man is, according to Adler, inherently a social being. He relates himself to other people, en- gages in co-operative social activities, places social welfare above sel- fish interest, and acquires a style of life which is predominantly so- cial in orientation. Adler did not say that man becomes socialized merely by being exposed to social processes; social interest is inborn although the specific types of relationships with people and social in- stitutions which develop are determined by the nature of the society into which a person is born. In one sense, then, Adler is just as bio- logical in his viewpoint as are Freud and Jung. All three assume that man has an inherent nature which shapes his personality. Freud emphasized sex, Jung emphasized primordial thought patterns, and Adler stressed social interest. This emphasis upon the social deter- minants of behavior which had been overlooked or minimized by Freud and Jung is probably Adler's greatest contribution to psycho- logical theory. It turned the attention of psychologists to the impor- tance of social variables and helped to develop the field of social psy- chology at a time when social psychology needed encouragement and support, especially from the ranks of psychoanalysis.

Adler's second major contribution to personality theory is his con- cept of the creative self.

Unlike Freud's ego which consists of a group of psychological processes serving the ends of inborn instincts, Alder's self is a highly personalized, subjective system which inter- prets and makes meaningful the experiences of the organism. More- over, it searches for experiences which will aid in fulfilling the per- son's unique style of life; if these experiences are not to be found in the world the self tries to create them. This concept of a creative self was new to psychoanalytic theory and it helped to compensate for the extreme "objectivism" of classical psychoanalysis, which relied almost entirely upon biological needs and external stimuli to account for the dynamics of personality. As we shall see in other chapters, 118 Theories of Personality the concept of the self has played a major role in recent formulations regarding personality. Adler's contribution to this new trend of rec- ognizing the self as an important cause of behavior is considered to be a very significant one (H. L. and R. R. Ansbacher, 1956).

A third feature of Adler's psychology which sets it apart from clas- sical psychoanalysis is its emphasis upon the uniqueness of person- ality. Adler considered each person to be a unique configuration of motives, traits, interests, and values; every act performed by the per- son bears the stamp of his own distinctive style of life. In this re- spect, Adler belongs to the tradition of William James and Wilhelm Stern who are said to have laid the foundation for personalistic psy- chology.

Adler's theory of the person minimized the sexual instinct which in Freud's early theorizing had played an almost exclusive role in the dynamics of behavior. To this Freudian monologue on sex, Adler added other significant voices. Man is primarily a social and not a sexual creature. He is motivated by social and not by sexual interest.

His inferiorities are not limited to the sexual domain, but may extend to all facets of his being, both physical and psychological. He strives to develop a unique style of life in which the sexual drive plays a minor role. In fact, the way in which he satisfies his sexual needs is determined by his style of life and not vice versa. Adler's dethron- ing of sex was for many people a welcome relief from the monot- onous pansexualism of Freud.

Finally, Adler made consciousness the center of personality. Man is a conscious being; he is ordinarily aware of the reasons for his behavior. He is conscious of his inferiorities and conscious of the goals for which he strives. More than that, he is a self-conscious in- dividual who is capable of planning and guiding his actions with full awareness of their meaning for his own self-realization. This is the complete antithesis of Freud's theory which had virtually reduced consciousness to the status of a nonentity, a mere froth floating on the great sea of the unconscious.

MAJOR CONCEPTS Alfred Adler, like other personality theorists whose primary train- ing was in medicine and who practiced psychiatry, began his theo- rizing in the field of abnormal psychology. He formulated a theory of neurosis before broadening his theoretical scope to include the normal personality, which occurred during the 1920's (H. L. and R. R. Ansbacher, 1956). Adler's theory of personality is an extremely Social Psychological Theories 119 economical one in the sense that a few basic concepts sustain the whole theoretical structure. For that reason, Adler's viewpoint can be rather quickly sketched under a few general rubrics. These are (1) fictional finalism, (2) striving for superiority, (3) inferiority feel- ings and compensation, (4) social interest, (5) style of life, and (6) the creative self.

FICTIONAL FINALISM. Shortly after Adler dissociated himself from the circle that surrounded Freud, he fell under the philosophical in- fluence of Hans Vaihinger whose book The psychology of "as if (English translation, 1925) had been published in 1911. Vaihinger propounded the curious and intriguing notion that man lives by many purely fictional ideas which have no counterpart in reality. These fictions, for example, "all men are created equal," "honesty is the best policy," and "the end justifies the means," enable man to deal more effectively with reality. They are auxiliary constructs or assumptions and not hypotheses which can be tested and confirmed. They can be dispensed with when their usefulness has disappeared.

Adler took over this philosophical doctrine of idealistic positivism and bent it to his own design. Freud, it will be recalled, laid great stress upon constitutional factors and experiences during early child- hood as determiners of personality. Adler discovered in Vaihinger the rebuttal to this rigid historical determinism; he found the idea that man is motivated more by his expectations of the future than he is by experiences of the past. These goals do not exist in the fu- ture as a part of some teleological design—neither Vaihinger nor Adler believed in predestination or fatality—rather they exist subjec- tively or mentally here and now as strivings or ideals which affect present behavior. If a person believes, for example, that there is a heaven for virtuous people and a hell for sinners this fiction, it may be presumed, will exercise considerable influence on his conduct.

These fictional goals were, for Adler, the subjective causation of psy- chological events.

Like Jung, Adler identified Freud's theory with the principle of causality and his own with the principle of finalism.

Individual Psychology insists absolutely on the indispensability of final- ism for the understanding of all psychological phenomena. Causes, pow- ers, instincts, impulses, and the like cannot serve as explanatory princi- ples.

The final goal alone can explain man's behavior. Experiences, traumata, sexual development mechanisms cannot yield an explanation, but the perspective in which these are regarded, the individual way of seeing them, which subordinates all life to the final goal, can do rt> (1930, p. 400). 120 Theories of Personality This final goal may be a fiction, that is, an ideal which is impossible to realize but which is nonetheless a very real spur to man's striving and the ultimate explanation of his conduct. Adler believed, how- ever, that the normal person could free himself from the influence of these fictions and face reality when necessity demanded, some- thing that the neurotic person is incapable of doing.

STRIVING FOR SUPERIORITY. What is the final goal toward which all men strive and which gives consistency and unity to personality?

By 1908, Adler had reached the conclusion that aggression was more important than sexuality.

A little later, the aggressive impulse was replaced by the "will to power." Adler identified power with mas- culinity and weakness with femininity.

It was at this stage of his thinking (circa 1910) that he set forth the idea of the "masculine protest," a form of overcompensation that both men and women in- dulge in when they feel inadequate and inferior. Later, Adler aban- doned the "will to power" in favor of the "striving for superiority," to which he remained committed thereafter. Thus, there were three stages in his thinking regarding the final goal of man: to be aggres- sive, to be powerful, and to be superior.

Adler makes it very clear that by superiority he does not mean social distinction, leadership, or a pre-eminent position in society.

By superiority, Adler means something very analogous to Jung's concept of the self or Goldstein's principle of self-actualization.

It is a striv- ing for perfect completion.

It is "the great upward drive." I began to see clearly in every psychological phenomenon the striving for superiority.

It runs parallel to physical growth and is an intrinsic necessity of life itself. It lies at the root of all solutions of life's prob- lems and is manifested in the way in which we meet these problems.

All our functions follow its direction. They strive for conquest, security, increase, either in the right or in the wrong direction.

The impetus from minus to plus never ends.

The urge from below to above never ceases. Whatever premises all our philosophers and psychologists dream of—self-preservation, pleasure principle, equalization—all these are but vague representations, attempts to express the great upward drive (1930, p.

398).

Where does the striving for superiority or perfection come from?

Adler says that it is innate; that it is a part of life; in fact, that it is life itself.

From birth to death, the striving for superiority carries the person from one stage of development to the next higher stage.

It is a prepotent dynamic principle. There are no separate drives, for each drive receives its power from the striving for completion.

Adler acknowledges that the striving for superiority may manifest it- Social Psychological Theories 121 self in a thousand different ways, and that each person has his own concrete mode of achieving or trying to achieve perfection. The neurotic person, for example, strives for self-esteem, power, and self- aggrandizement—in other words, for egoistic or selfish goals—whereas the normal person strives for goals that are primarily social in char- acter.

Precisely how do the particular forms of the striving for superiority come into being in the individual? In order to answer this question it is necessary to discuss Adler's concept of inferiority feelings.

INFERIORITY FEELINGS AND COMPENSATION. Very early in his career, while he was still interested in general medicine, Adler put forth the idea of organ inferiority and overcompensation (English translation, 1917).

At that time, he was interested in finding the answer to the perennial question of why people, when they became sick or suffer some affliction, became sick or afflicted in a particular region of the body. One person develops heart trouble, another lung trouble, and a third lumbago. Adler suggested that the reason for the site of a particular affliction was a basic inferiority in that region, an infe- riority which existed either by virtue of heredity or because of some developmental abnormalty. He then observed that a person with a defective organ often tries to compensate for the weakness by strength- ening it through intensive training. The most famous example of compensation for organ inferiority is that of Demosthenes who stut- tered as a child and became one of the world's greatest orators. An- other more recent example is that of Theodore Roosevelt who was a weakling in his youth and developed himself by systematic exercise into a physically stalwart man.

Shortly after he had published his monograph on organ inferiority Adler broadened the concept to include any feelings of inferiority, those that arise from subjectively felt psychological or social disabil- ities as well as those that stem from actual bodily weakness or im- pairment. At this time, Adler equated inferiority with unmanliness or femininity, the compensation for which was called "the masculine pro- test." Later, however, he subordinated this view to the more general one that feelings of inferiority arise from a sense of incompletion or imperfection in any sphere of life. For example, the child is mo- tivated by his feelings of inferiority to strive for a higher level of development. When he reaches this level, he begins to feel inferior again and the upward movement is initiated once more. Adler con- tended that inferiority feelings are not a sign of abnormality; they are the cause of all improvement in man's lot. Of course, inferiority 122 Theories of Personality feelings may be exaggerated by special conditions such as pampering or rejecting the child, in which case certain abnormal manifestations may ensue, such as the development of an inferiority complex or a compensatory superiority complex. But under normal circumstances, the feeling of inferiority or a sense of incompleteness is the great driv- ing force of mankind. In other words, man is pushed by the need to overcome his inferiority and pulled by the desire to be superior.

Adler was not a proponent of hedonism. Although he believed that inferiority feelings were painful he did not think that the relief of these feelings was necessarily pleasurable. Perfection, not pleasure, was for him the goal of life.

SOCIAL INTEREST. During the early years of his theorizing when he was proclaiming the aggressive, power-hungry nature of man and the idea of the masculine protest as an overcompensation for feminine weakness, Adler was severly criticized for emphasizing the selfish drives of man and ignoring his social motives. Striving for superi- ority sounded like the war cry of the Nietzschean superman, a fitting companion for the Darwinian slogan of survival of the fittest.

Adler, who was an advocate of social justice and a supporter of social democracy, enlarged his conception of man to include the factor of social interest (1939). Although social interest takes in such matters as co-operation, interpersonal and social relations, identi- fication with the group, empathy, and so forth, it is much broader than all of these. In its ultimate sense, social interest consists of the indi- vidual helping society to attain the goal of a perfect society. "Social interest is the true and inevitable compensation for all the natural weaknesses of individual human beings" (Adler, 1929b, p. 31).

The person is embedded in a social context from the first day of life.

Co-operation manifests itself in the relationship between the infant and the mother, and henceforth the person is continuously involved in a network of interpersonal relations which shape his personality and provide concrete outlets for his striving for superiority. Striving for superiority becomes socialized; the ideal of a perfect society takes the place of purely personal ambition and selfish gain. By working for the common good, man compensates for his individual weakness.

Adler believed that social interest is inborn; that man is a social creature by nature, and not by habit. However, like any other natural aptitude, this innate predisposition does not appear spontaneously but has to be brought to fruition by guidance and training. Because he believed in the benefits of education Adler devoted a great deal of his time to establishing child guidance clinics, to improving the Social Psychological Theories 12S schools, and to educating the public regarding proper methods of rearing children.

It is interesting to trace in Adler's writings the decisive although gradual change that occurred in his conception of man from the early years of his professional life when he was associated with Freud to his later years when he had achieved an international reputation. For the young Adler, man is driven by an insatiable lust for power and domination in order to compensate for a concealed deep-seated feeling of inferiority. For the older Adler, man is motivated by an innately given social interest which causes him to subordinate private gain to public welfare. The image of the perfect man living in a perfect society blotted out the picture of the strong, aggressive man dominat- ing and exploiting society. Social interest replaced selfish interest.

STYLE OF LIFE. This is the slogan of Adler's personality theory. It is a recurrent theme in all of Adler's later writings (for example, 1929a, 1931) and the most distinctive feature of his psychology. Style of life is the system principle by which the individual personality functions; it is the whole that commands the parts. Style of life is Adler's chief idiographic principle; it is the principle that explains the uniqueness of the person. Everyone has a style of life but no two people develop the same style.

Precisely what is meant by this concept? This is a difficult question to answer because Adler had so much to say about it and because he said different and sometimes conflicting things about it in his various writings. Then, too, it is difficult to differentiate it from another Adlerian concept, that of the creative self.

Every person has the same goal, that of superiority, but there are innumerable ways of striving for this goal. One person tries to become superior through developing his intellect, while another bends all of his efforts to achieving muscular perfection. The intellectual has one style of life, the athlete another. The intellectual reads, studies, thinks; he lives a more sedentary and more solitary life than the active man does. He arranges the details of his existence, his domestic habits, his recreations, his daily routine, his relations to his family, friends, and acquaintances, his social activities, in accordance with his goal of intellectual superiority. Everything he does he does with an eye to this ultimate goal. All of a person's behavior springs from his style of life. He perceives, learns, and retains what fits his style of Me, and ignores everything else.

The style of life is formed very early in childhood, by the age of four or five, and from then on experiences are assimilated and utilized 124 Theories of Personality according to this unique style of life. His attitudes, feelings, apper- ceptions become fixed and mechanized at an early age, and it is prac- tically impossible for the style of life to change thereafter. The per- son may acquire new ways of expressing his unique style of life, but these are merely concrete and particular instances of the same basic style that was found at an early age.

What determines the individual's style of life? In his earlier writ- ings, Adler said that it is largely determined by the specific inferiorities, either fancied or real, that the person has. The style of life is a com- pensation for a particular inferiority. If the child is a physical weak- ling, his style of life will take the form of doing those things which will produce physical strength. The dull child will strive for intel- lectual superiority. Napoleon's conquering style of life was deter- mined by his slight physical stature, and Hitler's rapacious craving for world domination by his sexual impotence. This simple explana- tion of man's conduct which appealed to so many of Adler's readers and which was widely applied in the analysis of character during the 1920's and 1930's did not satisfy Adler himself.

It was too simple and too mechanistic. He looked for a more dynamic principle and found the creative self.

THE CREATIVE SELF. This concept is Adler's crowning achievement as a personality theorist. When he discovered the creative self all of his other concepts were subordinated to it; here at last was the prime mover, the philosopher's stone, the elixer of life, the first cause of every- thing human for which Adler had been searching. The unitary, con- sistent, creative self is sovereign in the personality structure.

Like all first causes, the creative self is hard to describe. We can see its effects, but we cannot see it. It is something that intervenes be- tween the stimuli acting upon the person and the responses he makes to these stimuli. In essence, the doctrine of a creative self asserts that man makes his own personality. He constructs it out of the raw ma- terial of heredity and experience.

Heredity only endows him with certain abilities. Environment only gives him certain impressions. These abilities and impressions, and the man- ner in which he 'experiences' them—that is to say, the interpretation he makes of these experiences—are the bricks which he uses in his own 'creative' way in building up his attitude toward life. It is his individual way of using these bricks, or in other words his attitude toward life, which determines this relationship to the outside world (Adler, 1935, p. 5).

The creative self is the yeast that acts upon the facts of the world and transforms these facts into a personality that is subjective, dy- namic, unified, personal, and uniquely stylized. The creative self gives Social Psychological Theories 125 meaning to life; it creates the goal as well as the means to the goal.

The creative self is the active principle of human life, and it is not un- like the older concept of soul.

In summary, it may be said that Adler fashioned a humanistic theory of personality which was the antithesis of Freud's conception of man.

By endowing man with altruism, humanitarianism, co-operation, crea- tivity, uniqueness, and awareness, he restored to man a sense of dig- nity and worth that psychoanalysis had pretty largely destroyed. In place of the dreary materialistic picture which horrified and repelled many readers of Freud, Adler offered a portrait of man which was more satisfying, more hopeful, and far more complimentary to man. Adler's conception of the nature of personality coincided with the popular idea that man can be the master, and not the victim, of his fate.

CHARACTERISTIC RESEARCH AND RESEARCH METHODS Adler's empirical observations were made largely in the therapeutic setting and consist for the most part of reconstructions of the past as remembered by the patient and appraisals of present behavior on the basis of verbal reports. There is space to mention only a few examples of Adler's investigative activities.

ORDER OF BIRTH AND PERSONALITY. In line with his interest in the social determiners of personality, Adler observed that the personalities of the oldest, middle, and youngest child in a family were likely to be quite different (1931, pp. 144-154). He attributed these differences to the distinctive experiences that each child has as a member of a social group.

The first-born or oldest child is given a good deal of attention until the second child is born; then he is suddenly dethroned from his fav- ored position and must share his parents' affections with the new baby. This experience may condition the oldest child in various ways, such as hating people, protecting himself against sudden reversals of fortune, and feeling insecure. Oldest children are also apt to take an interest in the past when they were the center of attention. Neurotics, criminals, drunkards, and perverts, Adler observes, are often first-born children. If the parents handle the situation wisely by preparing the oldest child for the appearance of a rival, the oldest child is more likely to develop into a responsible, protective person.

The second or middle child is characterized by being ambitious. He is constantly trying to surpass his older sibling. He also tends to be rebellious and envious but by and large he is better adjusted than either his older or younger sibling. 126 Theories of Personality The youngest child is the spoiled child. Next to the oldest child he is most likely to become a problem child and a neurotic maladjusted adult.

This theory has been tested a number of times but most of the find- ings do not lend support to it (Jones, 1931).

EARLY MEMORIES. Adler felt that the earliest memory a person could report was an important key to understanding his basic style of life (1931). For example, a girl began an account of her earliest memory by saying, "When I was three years old, my father . . ." This indicates that she is more interested in her father than in her mother.

She then goes on to say that the father brought home a pair of ponies for an older sister and her, and that the older sister led her pony down the street by the halter while she was dragged along in the mud by her pony. This is the fate of the younger child—to come off second best in the rivalry with an older sibling—and it motivates her to try to surpass the pacemaker. Her style of life is one of driving ambition, an urge to be first, a deep feeling of insecurity and disappointment, and a strong foreboding of failure.

A young man who was being treated for severe attacks of anxiety recalled this early scene. "When I was about four years old I sat at the window and watched some workmen building a house on the opposite side of the street, while my mother knitted stockings." This recollec- tion indicates that the young man was pampered as a child because his memory includes the solicitous mother. The fact that he is looking at others who are working suggests that his style of life is that of a spectator rather than a participant. This is borne out by the fact that he becomes anxious whenever he tries to take up a vocation.

Adler suggested to him that he consider an occupation in which his preference for looking and observing could be utilized. The patient took Adler's advice and became a successful dealer in art objects.

Adler used this method with groups as well as individuals and found that it was an easy and economical way of studying personality.

CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES. Adler was particularly interested in the kinds of early influences that predispose the child to a faulty style of life.

He discovered three important factors: (1) children with in- feriorities, (2) spoiled children, and (3) neglected children. Children with physical or mental infirmities bear a heavy burden and are likely to feel inadequate in meeting the tasks of life. They consider them- selves to be, and often are, failures. However, if they have under- standing, encouraging parents they may compensate for their in- feriorities and transform their weakness into strength. Many promi- Social Psychological Theories 127 nent men started life with some organic weakness for which they compensated. Over and over again Adler spoke out vehemently against the evils of pampering for he considered this to be the greatest curse that can be visited upon the child. Pampered children do not develop social feeling; they become despots who expect society to conform to their self-centered wishes. Adler considered them to be potentially the most dangerous class in society. Neglect of the child also has unfortunate consequences. Badly treated in childhood, as adults they become enemies of society. Their style of life is domi- nated by the need for revenge. These three conditions—organic in- firmity, pampering, and rejection—produce erroneous conceptions of the world and result in a pathological style of life.

ERICH FROMM Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1900 and studied psychology and sociology at the Universities of Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Munich. After receiving a Ph.D. degree from Heidelberg in 1922, he was trained in psychoanalysis in Munich and at the famous Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He came to the United States in 1933 as a lecturer at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and then entered private practice in New York City. He has taught at a number of universities and institutes in this country. Not only have his books received considerable attention from specialists in the fields of psychol- ogy, sociology, philosophy, and religion but also from the general public.

The essential theme of all of Fromm's writings is that man feels lonely and isolated because he has become separated from nature and from other men. This condition of isolation is not found in any other species of animal; it is the distinctive human situation. The child, for example, gains freedom from the primary ties with his parents with the result that he feels isolated and helpless. The serf eventually se- cured his freedom only to find himself adrift in a predominantly alien world. As a serf, he belonged to someone and had a feeling of being related to the world and to other people, even though he was not free.

In this book, Escape from freedom (1941), Fromm develops the thesis that as man has gained more freedom throughout the ages he has also felt more alone. Freedom then becomes a negative condition from which he tries to escape.

What is the answer to this dilemma? Man can either unite himself with other people in the spirit of love and shared work or he can find 128 Theories of Personality security by submitting to authority and conforming to society. In the one case, man uses his freedom to develop a better society; in the other, he acquires a new bondage.

Escape from freedom was written under the shadow of the Nazi dictatorship and shows that this form of totalitarianism appealed to people because it offered them a new se- curity. But as Fromm points out in subsequent books (1947, 1955), any form of society that man has fashioned, whether it be that of feudalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, or communism, represents an attempt to resolve the basic contradiction of man. This contradic- tion consists of man being both a part of nature and separate from it, of being both an animal and a human being. As an animal he has certain physiological needs which must be satisfied. As a human being he possesses self-awareness, reason, and imagination. These two aspects constitute the basic conditions of man's existence. "The under- standing of man's psyche must be based on the analysis of mans needs stemming from the conditions of his existence" (1955, p. 25).

What are the specific needs that rise from the conditions of man's existence? They are five in number: the need for relatedness, the need for transcendence, the need for rootedness, the need for identity, and the need for a frame of orientation. The need for relatedness stems from the stark fact that man in becoming man has been torn from the animal's primary union with nature. "The animal is equipped by nature to cope with the very conditions it is to meet" (1955, p. 23) but man with his power to reason and imagine has lost this intimate interdependence with nature. In place of those instinctive ties with nature which animals possess man has to create his own relationships, the most satisfying being those which are based upon productive love.

Productive love always implies mutual care, responsibility, respect, and understanding.

The urge for transcendence refers to man's need to rise above his animal nature, to become a creative person instead of remaining a creature. If his creative urges are thwarted, man becomes a destroyer.

Fromm points out that love and hate are not antithetical drives; they are both answers to man's need to transcend his animal nature. Ani- mals can neither love nor hate, but man can.

Man desires natural roots; he wants to be an integral part of the world, to feel that he belongs. As a child, he is rooted to his mother but if this relationship persists past childhood it is considered to be an unwholesome fixation. Man finds his most satisfying and healthiest roots in a feeling of brotherliness with other men and women. But man wants also to have a sense of personal identity, to be a unique Social Psychological Theories 129 individual. If he cannot attain this goal through his own creative effort, he may obtain a certain mark of distinction by identifying him- self with another person or group. The slave identifies with the master, the citizen with his country, the worker with his company. In this case, the sense of identity arises from belonging to someone and not from being someone.

Finally, man needs to have a frame of reference, a stable and con- sistent way of perceiving and comprehending the world. The frame of reference that he develops may be primarily rational, primarily irrational, or it may have elements of both.

For Fromm these needs are purely human and purely objective.

They are not found in animals and they are not derived from observing what man says he wants. Nor are these strivings created by society; rather they have become embedded in human nature through evolu- tion. What then is the relation of society to the existence of man?

Fromm believes that the specific manifestations of these needs, the actual ways in which man realizes his inner potentialities, are deter- mined by "the social arrangements under which he lives" (1955, p. 14).

His personality develops in accordance with the opportunities that a particular society offers him. In a capitalistic society, for example, he may gain a sense of personal identity by becoming rich or develop a feeling of rootedness by becoming a dependable and trusted employee in a large company. In other words, man's adjustment to society usually represents a compromise between inner needs and outer de- mands. He develops a social character in keeping with the require- ments of the society.

From the standpoint of the proper functioning of a particular society it is absolutely essential that the child's character be shaped to fit the needs of society. The task of the parents and of education is to make the child want to act as he has to act if a given economic, political, and social system is to be maintained. Thus, in a capitalistic system the desire to save must be implanted in people in order that capital is available for an expanding economy. A society which has evolved a credit system must see to it that people will feel an inner compulsion to pay their bills promptly. Fromm gives numerous examples of the types of character that develop in a democratic, capitalistic society (1947).

By making demands upon man which are contrary to his nature, society warps and frustrates man. It alienates him from his "human situation" and denies him the fulfillment of the basic conditions of his existence. Both capitalism and communism, for example, try to make 130 Theories of Personality man into a robot, a wage slave, a nonentity, and they often succeed in driving him into insanity, antisocial conduct or self-destructive acts.

Fromm does not hesitate to stigmatize a whole society as being sick when it fails to satisfy the basic needs of man (1955).

Fromm also points out that when a society changes in any important respect, as occurred when feudalism changed into capitalism or when the factory system displaced the individual artisan, such a change is likely to produce dislocations in the social character of people.

The old character structure does not fit the new society, which adds to man's sense of alienation and despair. He is cut off from traditional ties and until he can develop new roots and relations he feels lost.

During such transitional periods, he becomes a prey to all sorts of panaceas and nostrums which offer him a refuge from loneliness.

The problem of man's relations to society is one of great concern to Fromm, and he returns to it again and again. Fromm is utterly con- vinced of the validity of the following propositions: (1) man has an essential, inborn nature, (2) society is created by man in order to fulfill this essential nature, (3) no society which has yet been devised meets the basic needs of man's existence, and (4) it is possible to create such a society.

What kind of a society does Fromm advocate?

It is one ...

in which man relates to man lovingly, in which he is rooted in bonds of brotherliness and solidarity . . . ; a society which gives him the possibility of transcending nature by creating rather than by destroy- ing, in which everyone gains a sense of self by experiencing himself as the subject of his powers rather than by conformity, in which a system of orientation and devotion exists without man's needing to distort re- ality and to worship idols (1955, p. 362).

Fromm even suggests a name for this perfect society: Humanistic Com- munitarian Socialism.

In such a society everyone would have equal opportunity to become fully human. There would be no loneliness, no feelings of isolation, no despair. Man would find a new home, one suited to the "human situation." KAREN HORNEY Karen Homey was born in Hamburg, Germany, September 16, 1885, and died in New York City, December 4, 1952, She received her medical training at the University of Berlin and was associated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute from 1918 to 1932. She was analyzed by Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs, two of the pre-eminent Social Psychological Theories 131 training analysts in Europe at that time. Upon the invitation of Franz Alexander, she came to the United States and was Associate Director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute for two years. In 1934 she moved to New York where she practiced psychoanalysis and taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Becoming dissatisfied with orthodox psychoanalysis, she and others of similar convictions founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the Ameri- can Institute of Psychoanalysis. She was Dean of this institute until her death.

Homey conceives of her ideas as falling within the framework of Freudian psychology, not as constituting an entirely new approach to the understanding of personality. She aspires to eliminate the fallacies in Freud's thinking—fallacies which have their root, she believes, in his mechanistic, biological orientation—in order that psychoanalysis may realize its full potentialities as a science of man. "My conviction, ex- pressed in a nutshell, is that psychoanalysis should outgrow the limi- tations set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology" (1939, p. 8).

Homey objects strongly to Freud's concept of penis envy as the determining factor in the psychology of women. Freud, it will be recalled, observed that the distinctive attitudes and feelings of women and their most profound conflict grew out of their feeling of genital in- feriority and their jealousy of the male. Homey believes that feminine psychology is based on lack of confidence and an overemphasis of the love relationship, and has very little to do with the anatomy of her sex organs. Regarding the Oedipus complex, Horney feels that it is not a sexual-aggressive conflict between the child and his parents but an anxiety growing out of basic disturbances, for example, rejection, overprotection, and punishment, in the child's relationships with his mother and father. Aggression is not inborn as Freud stated, but is a means by which man tries to protect his security. Narcissism is not really self-love but self-inflation and overvaluation owing to feelings of insecurity. Homey also takes issue with the following Freudian concepts: repetition compulsion, the id, ego, and superego, anxiety, and masochism (1939). On the positive side, Homey asserts that Freud's fundamental theoretical contributions are the doctrines of psychic determinism, unconscious motivation, and emotional, non- rational motives.

Horney's primary concept is that of basic anxiety, which is de- fined as 182 Theories of Personality . . . the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a poten- tially hostile world. A wide range of adverse factors in the environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, in- difference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child's individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admira- tion or the absence of it, lack of reliable warmth, having to take sides in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, overpro- tection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so on and so on (1945, p. 41).

In general, anything that disturbs the security of the child in relation to his parents produces basic anxiety.

The insecure, anxious child develops various strategies by which to cope with his feelings of isolation and helplessness (1937). He may become hostile and seek to avenge himself against those who have re- jected or mistreated him. Or he may become overly submissive in order to win back the love that he feels he has lost. He may develop an unrealistic, idealized picture of himself in order to compensate for his feelings of inferiority (1950). He may try to bribe others into loving him, or he may use threats to force people to like him. He may wallow in self-pity in order to gain people's sympathy.

If he cannot get love he may seek to obtain power over others. In that way, he compensates for his sense of helplessness, finds an outlet for hostility, and is able to exploit people. Or he becomes highly com- petitive, in which the winning is far more important than the achieve- ment. He may turn his aggression inward and belittle himself.

Any one of these strategies may become a more or less permanent fixture in the personality; a particular strategy may, in other words, assume the character of a drive or need in the personality dynamics.

Homey presents a list of ten needs which are acquired as a conse- quence of trying to find solutions for the problem of disturbed human relationships (1942). She calls these needs "neurotic" because they are irrational solutions to the problem.

1.

The neurotic need for affection and approval. This need is char- acterized by an indiscriminate wish to please others and to live up to their expectations. The person lives for the good opinion of others and is extremely sensitive to any sign of rejection or unfriendliness.

2.

The neurotic need for a "partner" who will take over one's life.

The person with this need is a parasite. He overvalues love, and is extremely afraid of being deserted and left alone.

3.

The neurotic need to restrict one's life within narrow borders.

Such a person is undemanding, content with little, prefers to remain inconspicuous, and values modesty above all else. Social Psychological Theories 133 4.

The neurotic need for power. This need expresses itself in craving power for its own sake, in an essential disrespect for others, and in an indiscriminate glorification of strength and a contempt for weakness. People who are afraid to exert power openly may try to control others through intellectual exploitation and superiority. An- other variety of the power drive is the need to believe in the omnipo- tence of will. Such people feel they can accomplish anything simply by exerting will power.

5.

The neurotic need to exploit others.

6. The neurotic need for prestige. One's self-evaluation is deter- mined by the amount of public recognition received.

7.

The neurotic need for personal admiration.

A person with this need has an inflated picture of himself and wishes to be admired on this basis, not for what he really is.

8. The neurotic ambition for personal achievement.

Such a person wants to be the very best and drives himself to greater and greater achievements as a result of his basic insecurity.

9. The neurotic need for self-sufficiency and independence.

Having been disappointed in his attempts to find warm, satisfying relationships with people, the person sets himself apart from others and refuses to be tied down to anyone or anything. He becomes a lone wolf.

10.

The neurotic need for perfection and unassailability.

Fearful of making mistakes and of being criticized, the person who has this need tries to make himself impregnable and infallible. He is constantly searching for flaws in himself so that they may be covered up before they become obvious to others.

These ten needs are the sources from which inner conflicts develop.

The neurotic's need for love, for example, is insatiable; the more he gets the more he wants. Consequently, he is never satisfied. Like- wise, his need for independence can never be fully satisfied because another part of his personality wants to be loved and admired. The search for perfection is a lost cause from the beginning. All of the foregoing needs are unrealistic.

In a later publication (1945), Horney classifies these ten needs under three headings: (1) moving toward people, for example, need for love, (2) moving away from people, for instance, need for inde- pendence, and (3) moving against people, for example, need for power. Each of these rubrics represents a basic orientation toward others and oneself.

Horney finds in these different orientations the basis for inner conflict. The essential difference between a normal and a neurotic conflict is one of degree. ". . . the disparity between 134 Theories of Personality the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic" (1945, p. 31). In other words, everyone has these conflicts but some people, primarily because of early experiences with rejection, neglect, overprotection, and other kinds of unfortunate parental treatment, possess them in an aggravated form.

While the normal person can resolve these conflicts by integrating the three orientations, since they are not mutually exclusive, the neurotic person, because of his greater basic anxiety, must utilize irra- tional and artificial solutions. He consciously recognizes only one of the trends and denies or represses the other two. Or he creates an idealized image of himself in which the contradictory trends presum- ably disappear, although actually they do not. In a later book (1950), Horney has a great deal more to say about the unfortunate conse- quences that flow from the development of an unrealistic conception of the self and from attempts to live up to this idealized picture.

The search for glory, feelings of self-contempt, morbid dependency upon other people, and self-abasement are some of the unhealthy and de- structive results that grow out of an idealized self.

A third solution employed by the neurotic person for his inner conflicts is to externalize them. He says, in effect, "I don't want to exploit other people, they want to exploit me." This solution creates conflicts between the person and the outside world.

All of these conflicts are avoidable or resolvable if the child is raised in a home where there is security, trust, love, respect, tolerance, and warmth. That is, Horney, unlike Freud and Jung, does not feel that conflict is built into the nature of man and is therefore inevitable.

Conflict arises out of social conditions. "The person who is likely to become neurotic is one who has experienced the culturally deter- mined difficulties in an accentuated form, mostly through the medium of childhood experience" (1937, p. 290).

HARRY STACK SULLIVAN Harry Stack Sullivan is the creator of a new viewpoint which is known as the interpersonal theory of psychiatry.

Its major tenet as it relates to a theory of personality is that personality is "the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which character- ize a human life" (1953, p. 111). Personality is a hypothetical entity which cannot be isolated from interpersonal situations, and interper- sonal behavior is all that can be observed as personality. Conse- quently, it is vacuous, Sullivan believes, to speak of the individual as Social Psychological Theories 135 the object of study because the individual does not and cannot exist apart from his relations with other people. From the first day of life, the baby is a part of an interpersonal situation, and throughout the rest of his life he remains a member of a social field. Even a hermit who has resigned from society carries with him into the wilderness memories of former personal relationships which continue to influence his thinking and acting.

Although Sullivan does not deny the importance of heredity and maturation in forming and shaping the organism, he feels that that which is distinctly human is the product of social interactions. More- over, the interpersonal experiences of a person may and do alter his purely physiological functioning, so that even the organism loses its status as a biological entity and becomes a social organism with its own socialized ways of breathing, digesting, eliminating, circulating, and so forth.

For Sullivan, the science of psychiatry is allied with social psy- chology, and his theory of personality bears the imprint of his strong preference for social psychological concepts and variables. He writes, The general science of psychiatry seems to me to cover much the same field as that which is studied by social psychology, because scientific psy- chiatry has to be defined as the study of interpersonal relations, and this in the end calls for the use of the kind of conceptual framework that we now call -field theory. From such a standpoint, personality is taken to be hypothetical. That which can be studied is the pattern of processes which characterize the interaction of personalities in particular recurrent situations or fields which "include" the observer (1950, p. 92).

Harry Stack Sullivan was born on a farm near Norwich, New York, on February 21, 1892, and died on January 14, 1949, in Paris, France, on his way home from a meeting of the executive board of the World Federation for Mental Health in Amsterdam. He received his medical degree from the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery in 1917, and served with the armed forces during the First World War.

Following the war he was a medical officer of the Federal Board for Vocational Education and then became an officer with the Public Health Service. In 1922 Sullivan went to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D. C, where he came under the influence of William Alanson White, a leader in American neuropsychiatry. From 1923 until 1930 he was associated with the Medical School of the University of Maryland and with the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. It was during this period of his life that Sullivan conducted investigations of schizophrenia which established his repu- 136 Theories of Personality tation as a medical scientist. In 1933 he became president of the William Alanson White Foundation, serving in that office until 1943.

In 1936, he helped found and became director of the Washington School of Psychiatry, which is the training institution of the founda- tion. The journal Psychiatry began publication in 1938 to promote Sullivan's theory of interpersonal relations. He was its coeditor and then editor until his death. Sullivan served as consultant for the Selective Service System in 1940-1941; he was a participant during 1948 in the UNESCO Tensions Project established by the United Na- tions to study tensions affecting international understanding; and he was appointed a member of the international preparatory commission for the International Congress of Mental Health in the same year.

Sullivan was a scientific statesman as well as a prominent spokesman for psychiatry, the leader of an important school for training psy- chiatrists, a remarkable therapist, an intrepid theorist, and a produc- tive medical scientist. By his vivid personality and original thinking, he attracted a number of people who became his disciples, students, colleagues, and friends.

Aside from William Alanson White, the chief influences on Sulli- van's intellectual development were Freud, Adolph Meyer, the social philosopher, George Mead, the cultural anthropologists, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, and the sociologist, Leonard Cottrell. Sullivan felt particularly close to Edward Sapir who was one of the pioneers in advocating a closer working relationship between anthropology, sociol- ogy, and psychoanalysis. Sullivan began to formulate his theory of interpersonal relations in 1929 and had consolidated his thinking by the mid-1930's.

During his lifetime Sullivan published only one book setting forth his theory (1947). However, he kept detailed notebooks and many of his lectures to the students of the Washington School of Psychiatry were recorded. These notebooks and recordings, as well as other un- published material, have been turned over to the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation. Two books based upon the Sullivan papers have recently been published. The interpersonal theory of psychiatry (1953) consists mainly of a series of lectures given by Sulli- van in the winter of 1946-1947 and represents the last complete account of his theory of interpersonal relations. The other book, The psychiatric interview (1954), is based upon two lecture series that Sullivan gave in 1944 and 1945. Other books compiled from the Sullivan papers are to be published soon. Patrick Mullahy, a phi- losopher and disciple of Sullivan, has edited several books dealing with Social Psychological Theories 137 the theory of interpersonal relations. One of these, A study of inter- personal relations (1949), contains a group of papers by people associ- ated with the Washington School and the William Alanson White In- stitute in New York City. All of the articles were originally printed in Psychiatry, including three by Sullivan. Another book entitled The contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan (1952) consists of a group of papers presented at a memorial symposium by representatives of vari- ous disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. This book contains a succinct account of interpersonal theory by Mullahy and a complete bibliography of Sullivan's writings through 1951. A similar digest of Sullivan's views also appears in Mullahy's book, Oedipus—myth and complex (1948). Sullivan's interpersonal theory has been treated at length by Dorothy Blitsten (1953). In spite of Sullivan's own sparse presentation of interpersonal theory in published form during his lifetime, his systematic position is being thoroughly ex- pounded by a number of very literate and dedicated followers.

THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY Sullivan insists repeatedly that personality is a purely hypothetical entity which cannot be observed or studied apart from interpersonal situations. The unit of study is the interpersonal situation and not the person. The organization of personality consists of interpersonal events rather than intrapsychic ones. Personality only manifests it- self when the person is behaving in relation to one or more other in- dividuals. These people do not need to be present; in fact they can even be illusory or nonexistent figures. A person may have a relation- ship with a folk hero like Paul Bunyan or a fictional character like Anna Karenina or with his ancestors or with his as yet unborn de- scendants. Perceiving, remembering, thinking, imagining, and all of the other psychological processes are interpersonal in character. Even nocturnal dreams are interpersonal, since they usually reflect the dreamer's relationships with other people.

Although Sullivan grants personality only hypothetical status, none- theless he asserts that it is a dynamic center of various processes which occur in a series of interpersonal fields. Moreover, he gives substan- tive status to some of these processes by identifying and naming them and by conceptualizing some of their properties. The principal ones are dynamisms, personifications, and cognitive processes.

DYNAMISMS. A dynamism is the smallest unit which can be em- ployed in the study of the individual. It is defined as "the relatively enduring pattern of energy tranformations, which recurrently charac- 138 Theories of Personality terize the organism in its duration as a living organism" (1953, p. 103).

An energy transformation is any form of behavior. It may be overt and public like talking, or covert and private like thinking and fan- tasying. Because a dynamism is a pattern of behavior that endures and recurs, it is about the same thing as a habit. Sullivan's defini- tion of pattern is quaintly phrased; he says it is "an envelope of in- significant particular differences" (1953, p. 104). This means that a new feature may be added to a pattern without changing the pattern just as long as it is not significantly different from the other contents of the envelope. If it is significantly different it changes the pattern into a new pattern. For example, two apples may be quite different in appearance and yet be identified as apples because their differences are not important. However, an apple and a banana are different in significant respects and consequently form two different patterns.

The dynamisms which are distinctively human in character are those which characterize one's interpersonal relations.

For example, one may behave in a habitually hostile way toward a certain person or group of persons, which is an expression of a dynamism of malevolence. A man who tends to seek out lascivious relationships with women dis- plays a dynamism of lust. A child who is afraid of strangers has a dynamism of fear. Any habitual reaction towards one or more per- sons, whether it be in the form of a feeling, an attitude, or an overt action, constitutes a dynamism. All people have the same basic dy- namisms but the mode of expression of a dynamism varies in accord- ance with the situation and the life experience of the individual.

A dynamism usually employs a particular zone of the body such as the mouth, the hands, the anus, and the genitals by means of which it interacts with the environment. A zone consists of a receptor ap- paratus for receiving stimuli, an effector apparatus for performing ac- tion, and a connecting apparatus called eductors in the central nerv- ous system which connects the receptor mechanism with the effector mechanism. Thus, when the nipple is brought to the baby's mouth it stimulates the sensitive membrane of the lips which discharges im- pulses along nerve pathways to the motor organs of the mouth which produce sucking movements.

Most dynamisms serve the purpose of satisfying the basic needs of the organism. However, there is an important dynamism which de- velops as a result of anxiety. This is called the dynamism of the self or the self-system.

The self-system. Anxiety is a product of interpersonal relations, being transmitted originally from the mother to the infant and later Social Psychological Theories 139 in life by threats to one's security. In order to avoid or minimize actual or potential anxiety, the person adopts various types of pro- tective measures and supervisory controls over his behavior. He learns, for example, that he can avoid punishment by conforming to his par- ents' wishes. These security measures form the self-system which sane- / tions certain forms of behavior (the good-me self) and forbids other forms (the bad-me self).

The self-system as the guardian of one's security tends to become isolated from the rest of the personality; it excludes information that is incongruous with its present organization and fails thereby to profit from experience. Since the self guards the person from anxiety, it is held in high esteem and is protected from criticism. As the self- system grows in complexity and independence, it prevents the person from making objective judgments of his own behavior and it glosses over obvious contradictions between what the person really is and what his self-system says he is. In general, the more experiences the person has with anxiety, the more inflated his self-system becomes and the more it becomes dissociated from the rest of his personality.

Although the self-system serves the useful purpose of reducing anx- iety, it interferes with one's ability to live constructively with others.

Sullivan believes that the self-system is a product of the irrational V aspects of society. By this he means that the young child is made to feel anxious for reasons that would not exist in a more rational society; he is forced to adopt unnatural and unrealistic ways of deal- ing with his anxiety. Although Sullivan recognizes that the develop- ment of a self-system is absolutely necessary for avoiding anxiety in modern society, and perhaps in any kind of society which man is ca- pable of fashioning, he also acknowledges that the self-system as we know it today is "the principal stumbling block to favorable changes * in personality" (1953, p. 169).

PERSONIFICATIONS. A personification is an image that an individual has of himself or of another person. It is a complex of feelings, at- titudes, and conceptions that grows out of experiences with need- satisfaction and anxiety. For example, the baby develops a person- ification of a good mother by being nursed and cared for by her.

Any interpersonal relationship which involves satisfaction tends to build up a favorable picture of the satisfying agent. On the other hand, the baby's personification of a bad mother results from expe- riences with her that evoke anxiety. The anxious mother becames personified as the bad mother. Ultimately, these two personifications of the mother along with any others that may be formed, such as the 140 Theories of Personality seductive mother or the overprotective mother, fuse together to form a complex personification.

~ These pictures that we carry around in our heads are rarely ac- curate descriptions of the people to whom they refer. They are formed in the first place in order to cope with people in fairly iso- lated interpersonal situations, but once formed they usually persist and influence our attitudes towards other people. Thus a person who personifies his father as a mean and dictatorial man may project this same personification onto other older men, for example, teachers, po- licemen, and employers. Consequently, something that serves an anx- iety-reducing function in early life may interfere with one's interper- sonal relations later in life. These anxiety-fraught pictures distort one's conceptions of currently significant people. Personifications of the self such as the good-me and the bad-me follow the same prin- ciples as personifications of others. The good-me personification re- sults from interpersonal experiences which are rewarding in charac- ter, the bad-me personification from anxiety-arousing situations. And like personifications of other people, these self-personifications tend to stand in the way of objective self-evaluation.

Personifications which are shared by a number of people are called stereotypes. These are consensually validated conceptions, that is, ideas which have wide acceptance among the members of a society and are handed down from generation to generation. Examples of common stereotypes in our culture are the absent-minded professor, the unconventional artist, and the hard-headed businessman.

~ COGNITIVE PROCESSES. Sullivan's unique contribution regarding the place of cognition in the affairs of personality is his threefold classi- fication of experience. Experience, he says, occurs in three modes; these are prototaxic, paratctxic, and syntaxic. Prototaxic experience "may be regarded as the discrete series of momentary states of the sensitive organism" (1953, p. 29). This type of experience is similar to what James called the "stream of consciousness," the raw sensa- tions, images, and feelings that flow through the mind of a sensate being. They have no necessary connections among themselves and possess no meaning for the experiencing person. The prototaxic mode of experience is found in its purest form during the early months of life and is the necessary precondition for the appearance of the other two modes.

The parataxic mode of thinking consists of seeing causal relation- ship between events that occur at about the same time but which are not logically related. The eminent Czech writer, Franz Kafka, Social Psychological Theories 141 portrays an interesting case of parataxic thinking in one of his short stories. A dog who lived in a kennel surrounded by a high fence was urinating one day when a bone was thrown over the fence. The dog thought, "My urinating made that bone appear." Thereafter whenever he wanted something to eat he lifted his leg. Sullivan be- lieves that much of our thinking does not advance beyond the level of parataxis; that we see causal connections between experiences that have nothing to do with one another. All superstitions, for instance, are examples of parataxic thinking.

The third and highest mode of thinking is the syntaxic, which con- sists of consensually validated symbol activity, expecially of a verbal nature. A consensually validated symbol is one which has been agreed upon by a group of people as having a standard meaning. Words and numbers are the best examples of such symbols. The syntaxic mode produces logical order among experiences and enables people to communicate with one another.

In addition to this formulation of the modes of experience, Sullivan emphasizes the importance of foresight in cognitive functioning.

"Man, the person, lives with his past, the present and the neighboring future all clearly relevant in explaining his thought and action" (1950, p.

84). Foresight depends upon one's memory of the past and inter- pretation of the present.

Although dynamisms, personifications, and cognitive processes do not complete the list of the constituents of personality, they are the chief distinguishing structural features of Sullivan's system.

THE DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY Sullivan, in common with many other personality theorists, con- ceives of personality as an energy system whose chief work consists of activities that will reduce tension. Sullivan says there is no need to add the term "mental" to either energy or tension since he uses them in exactly the same sense as they are used in physics.

TENSION. Sullivan begins with the familiar conception of the organism as a tension system which theoretically can vary between the limits of absolute relaxation, or euphoria as Sullivan prefers to call it, and absolute tension as exemplified by extreme terror. There are two main sources of tension: (1) tensions that arise from the needs of the organism, and (2) tensions that result from anxiety. Needs are con- nected with the physiochemical requirements of life; they are such conditions as lack of food or water or oxygen which produce a dis- equilibrium in the economy of the organism. Needs may be general in 142 Theories of Personality character, such as hunger, or they may be more specifically related to a zone of the body, such as the need to suck. Needs arrange them- selves in a hierarchical order; those lower down on the ladder must be satisfied before those higher on the ladder can be accommodated.

One result of need reduction is an experience of satisfaction. "Ten- sions can be regarded as needs for particular energy transformations which will dissipate the tension, often with an accompanying change of 'mental' state, a change of awareness, to which we can apply the general term, satisfaction" (1950, p. 85). The typical consequence of prolonged failure to satisfy the needs is a feeling of apathy which pro- duces a general lowering of the tensions.

r~~Anxiety is the experience of tension that results from real or imagi- nary threats to one's security. In large amounts, it reduces the effi- ciency of the individual in satisfying his needs, disturbs interpersonal relations, and produces confusion in thinking. Anxiety varies in in- tensity depending upon the seriousness of the threat and the effective- ness of the security operations that the person has at his command.

Severe anxiety is like a blow on the head; it conveys no information to the person but instead produces utter confusion and even amnesia.

Less severe forms of anxiety can be informative. In fact, Sullivan believes that anxiety is the first greatly educative influence in living.

Anxiety is transmitted to the infant by the "mothering one" who is herself expressing anxiety in her looks, tone of voice, and general demeanor. Sullivan admits that he does not know how this transmis- sion takes place, although it is probably accomplished by some kind of empathic process whose nature is obscure. As a consequence of this mother-transmitted anxiety, other objects in the near surroundings be- come freighted with anxiety by the operation of the parataxic mode of associating contiguous experiences. The mother's nipple, for ex- ample, is changed into a bad nipple which produces avoidance reac- tions in the baby. The infant learns to veer away from activities and objects that increase anxiety. When the baby cannot escape anxiety, he tends to fall asleep. This dynamism of somnolent detachment, as Sullivan calls it, is the counterpart of apathy, which is the dynamism aroused by unsatisfied needs. In fact, these two dynamisms cannot be objectively differentiated. Sullivan says that one of the great tasks of psychology is to discover the basic vulnerabilities to anxiety in inter- personal relations rather than to try to deal with the symptoms re- sulting from anxiety.

ENERGY TRANSFORMATIONS. Energy is transformed by performing work. Work may be overt actions involving the striped muscles of the Social Psychological Theories 143 body or it may be mental such as perceiving, remembering, and think- ing. These overt or covert activities have as their goal the relief of tension. They are to a great extent conditioned by the society in which the person is raised. "What anyone can discover by investigat- ing his past is that patterns of tensions and energy transformations which make up his living are to a truly astonishing extent matters of his education for living in a particular society" (1950, p. 83).

Sullivan does not believe that instincts are important sources of human motivation nor does he accept the libido theory of Freud. An individual learns to behave in a particular way as a result of interac- tions with people, and not because he possesses innate imperatives for certain kinds of action.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY Sullivan was very assiduous in spelling out the sequence of inter- personal situations to which the person is exposed in passing from in- fancy to adulthood, and the ways in which these situations contribute to the formation of personality. More than any other personality theorist, with the possible exception of Freud, Sullivan viewed per- sonality from the perspective of definite stages of development.

Whereas Freud held the position that development is largely an unfolding of the sex instinct, Sullivan argued persuasively for a more social-psychological view of personality growth, one in which the unique contributions of human relationships would be accorded their proper due. Although Sullivan did not reject biological factors as conditioners of the growth of personality, he did subordinate them to the social determiners of psychological development. Moreover, he was of the opinion that sometimes these social influences run counter to the biological needs of the person and have detrimental effects upon his personality. Sullivan was not one to shy away from recognizing the deleterious influences of society. In fact, Sullivan, like other social-psychological theorists, was a sharp, incisive critic of con- temporary society.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT. Sullivan delineates six stages in the de- velopment of personality prior to the final stage of maturity. These six stages are typical for Western European cultures and may be different in other societies. They are (1) infancy, (2) childhood, (3) the juvenile era, (4) preadolescence, (5) early adolescence, and (6) late adolescence.

The period of infancy extends from birth to the appearance of articu- late speech. It is the period in which the oral zone is the primary 144 Theories of Personality zone of interaction between the baby and his environment. Nursing provides the baby with his first interpersonal experience. The feature of the environment which stands out during infancy is the object which supplies food to the hungry baby, either the nipple of the mother's breast or the nipple of the bottle. The baby develops various conceptions of the nipple depending upon the kinds of experiences he has with it. These are: (1) the good nipple which is the signal for nursing and a sign that satisfaction is forthcoming, (2) the good but unsatisfactory nipple because the baby is not hungry, (3) the wrong nipple because it does not give milk and is a signal for rejection and subsequent search for another nipple, and (4) the bad nipple of the anxious mother which is a signal for avoidance.

Other characteristic features of the infantile stages are (1) the ap- pearance of the dynamisms of apathy and somnolent detachment, (2) the transition from a prototaxic to a parataxic mode of cognition, (3) the organization of personifications such as the bad, anxious, rejecting, frustrating mother and the good, relaxed, accepting, satisfying mother, (4) the organization of experience through learning and the emerg- ence of the rudiments of the self-system, (5) the differentiation of the baby's own body so that the baby learns to satisfy his tensions inde- pendently of the mothering one, for example, by thumbsucking, and (6) the learning of co-ordinated moves involving hand and eye, hand and mouth, and ear and voice.

The transition from infancy to childhood is made possible by the learning of language and the organization of experience in the syntaxic mode. Childhood extends from the emergence of articulate speech to the appearance of the need for playmates. The development of lan- guage permits, among other things, the fusion of different personifica- tions, for instance, the good and bad mother, and the integration of the self-system into a more coherent structure. The self-system begins to develop the conception of gender: the little boy identifies with the masculine role as prescribed by society, the little girl with the feminine role. The growth of symbolic ability enables the child to play at being a grownup—Sullivan calls these as-if performances drama- tizations—and to become concerned with various activities both overt and covert which serve the purpose of warding off punishment and anxiety—Sullivan calls these preoccupations.

One dramatic event of childhood is the malevolent transformation, the feeling that one lives among enemies. This feeling, if it becomes strong enough, makes it impossible for the child to respond positively to the affectionate advances of other people. The malevolent trans- Social Psychological Theories 145 formation distorts the child's interpersonal relations and causes the child to isolate himself.

He says, in effect, "Once upon a time every- thing was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people." The malevolent transformation is caused by painful and anxious experiences with people, and may lead to a regression to the less threatening stage of infancy.

Sublimation, which Sullivan defines as "the unwitting substitution for a behavior pattern which encounters anxiety or collides with the self-system, of a socially more acceptable activity pattern which satis- fies parts of the motivational system that caused trouble" (1953, p.

193), appears during childhood. The excess of tension which is not discharged by sublimation is expended in symbolic performances, for instance, in nocturnal dreams.

The juvenile stage extends throughout most of the grammar-school years.

It is the period for becoming social, for acquiring experiences of social subordination to authority figures outside of the family, for becoming competitive and co-operative, for learning the meaning of ostracism, disparagement, and group feeling. The juvenile learns to be inattentive to external circumstances that do not interest him, to supervise his behavior by internal controls, to form stereotypes in his attitudes, to develop new and more effective modes of sublimation, and to distinguish more clearly between fantasy and reality.

One great event of this period is the emergence of a conception of orientation in living.

One is oriented in living to the extent to which one has formulated, or can easily be led to formulate (or has insight into), data of the follow- ing types: the integrating tendencies (needs) which customarily charac- terize one's interpersonal relations; the circumstances appropriate to their satisfaction and relatively anxiety-free discharge; and the more or less remote goals for the approximation of which one will forego intercur- rent opportunities for satisfaction or the enhancement of one's prestige (1953, p. 243).

The relatively brief period of preadolescence is marked by the need for an intimate relationship with a peer of the same sex, a chum in whom one can confide and with whom one can collaborate in meeting the tasks and solving the problems of life. This is an extremely im- portant period because it marks the beginning of genuine human rela- tionships with other people. In earlier periods, the interpersonal situa- tion is characterized by the dependence of the child upon an older person. During preadolescence, the child begins to form peer rela- tionships in which there are equality, mutuality, and reciprocity be- 146 Theories of Personality tween the members. Without an intimate companion, the preadoles- _cent becomes the victim of a desperate loneliness.

The main problem of the period of early adolescence is the develop- ment of a pattern of heterosexual activity. The physiological changes of puberty are experienced by the youth as feelings of lust; out of these feelings the lust dynamism emerges and begins to assert itself in the personality. The lust dynamism involves primarily the genital zone, but other zones of interaction such as the mouth and the hands also participate in sexual behavior. There is a separation of erotic need from the need for intimacy; the erotic need takes as its object a mem- ber of the opposite sex while the need for intimacy remains fixated upon a member of the same sex. If these two needs do not become divorced, the young person displays a homosexual rather than a heterosexual orientation. Sullivan points out that many of the con- flicts of adolescence arise out of the opposing needs for sexual grati- fication, security, and intimacy. Early adolescence persists until the person has found some stable pattern of performances which satisfies his genital drives.

"Late adolescence extends from the patterning of preferred genital activity through unnumbered educative and eductive steps to the es- tablishment of a fully human or mature repertory of interpersonal relations as permitted by available opportunity, personal and cultural" (1953, p. 297). In other words, the period of late adolescence con- stitutes a rather prolonged initiation into the privileges, duties, satis- factions, and responsibilities of social living and citizenship. The full complement of interpersonal relations gradually takes form and there is a growth of experience in the syntaxic mode which permits a widen- ing of the symbolic horizons. The self-system becomes stabilized, more effective sublimations of tensions are learned, and stronger security jneasures against anxiety are instituted.

When the individual has ascended all of these steps and reached the final stage of adulthood, he has been transformed largely by means of his interpersonal relations from an animal organism into a human person. He is not an animal, coated by civilization and humanity, but an animal that has been so drastically altered that he is no longer an animal but a human being—or, if one prefers, a human animal.

""""DETERMINERS OF DEVELOPMENT. Although Sullivan firmly rejects any hard and fast instinct doctrine he does acknowledge the im- portance of heredity in providing certain capacities, chief among which are the capacities for receiving and elaborating experiences.

He also accepts the principle that training cannot be effective before Social Psychological Theories 147 maturation has laid the structural groundwork. Thus, the child can- not learn to walk until the muscles and bony structure have reached a level of growth which will support him in an upright position.

Heredity and maturation provide the biological substratum for the development of personality, that is, the capacities and predispositions and inclinations, but the culture operating through a system of inter- personal relations makes manifest the abilities and the actual per- formances (energy transformations) by which the person reaches the goal of tension reduction and need-satisfaction.

The first educative influence is that of anxiety which forces the young organism to discriminate between increasing and decreasing tension and to guide his activity in the direction of the latter. The second great educational force is that of trial and success. Success, as many psychologists have pointed out, tends to stamp in the activity which has led to gratification. Success may be equated with the earning of rewards—a mother's smile or a father's praise; failure with punishments—a mother's forbidding look or a father's words of dis- approval. One may also learn by imitation and by inference; for the latter type of learning Sullivan adopts the name proposed by Charles Spearman: eduction of relations.

Sullivan does not believe that personality is set at an early age.

It may change at any time as new interpersonal situations arise be- cause the human organism is extremely plastic and malleable. Al- though the forward thrust of learning and development predominates, regressions can and do occur when pain, anxiety, and failure become intolerable.

CHARACTERISTIC RESEARCH AND RESEARCH METHODS Harry Stack Sullivan, in common with other psychiatrists, acquired his empirical knowledge of personality by working with patients suffering from various types of personality disorders but chiefly with schizophrenics and obsessional cases. As a young psychiatrist, Sul- livan discovered that the method of free association did not work satisfactorily with schizophrenics because it aroused too much anxi- ety. Other methods were tried but these also proved to provoke anxiety which interfered with the communication process between patient and therapist. Consequently, Sullivan became interested in studying the forces that impede and facilitate communication between two people. In so doing, he found that the psychiatrist was much more than an observer; he was also a vital participant in an inter- personal situation. He had his own apprehensions, such as his pro- 148 Theories of Personality fessional competence and his personal problems, to deal with. As a result of this discovery Sullivan developed his conception of the therapist as a participant observer.

The theory of interpersonal relations lays great stress on the method of participant observation, and relegates data obtained by other methods to at most a secondary importance. This in turn implies that skill in the face to face, or person to person psychiatric interview is of fundamental importance (1950, p. 122).

THE INTERVIEW. The psychiatric interview is Sullivan's term for the type of interpersonal, face to face situation that takes place between the patient and the therapist. There may be only one interview or there may be a sequence of interviews with a patient extending over a long period of time. Sullivan defines the interview as "a system, or series of systems, of interpersonal processes, arising from participant observation in which the interviewer derives certain conclusions about the interviewee" (1954, p. 128). How the interview is conducted and the ways in which the interviewer reaches conclusions regarding the patient form the subject matter of Sullivan's book, The psychiatric interview (1954).

Sullivan divides the interview into four stages: (1) the formal in- ception, (2) reconnaissance, (3) detailed inquiry, and (4) the ter- mination.

The interview is primarily a vocal communication between two people. Not only what the person says but how he says it—his in< tonations, rate of speech, and other expressive behavior—are the chief sources of information for the interviewer. He should be alert to subtle changes in the patients vocalizations, for example, changes in volume, because these clues often reveal vital evidence regarding the patient's focal problems and attitudinal changes towards the therapist.

In the inception, the interviewer should avoid asking too many ques- tions but should maintain an attitude of quiet observation. He should try to determine the reasons for the patient's coming to him and something as to the nature of his problems.

Sullivan is very explicit about the role of the therapist in the in- terview situation. He should never forget that he is earning his living as an expert in the area of interpersonal relations, and that the patient has a right to expect he is going to learn something which will bene- fit him. The patient should feel this from the very first interview, and it should be continually reinforced throughout the course of treat- ment. Only by having such an attitude will the patient divulge in- Social Psychological Theories 149 formation from which the interviewer can reach the proper conclu- sions regarding the patterns of living which are causing trouble for the patient. Obviously, the psychiatrist should not use his expert knowledge to obtain personal satisfaction or to enhance his prestige at the expense of the patient. The interviewer is not a friend or enemy, a parent or lover, a boss or employee, although the patient may cast him in one or more of these roles as a result of distorted parataxic thinking; the interviewer is an expert in interpersonal re- lations.

The period of reconnaissance centers about finding out who the patient is. The interviewer does this by means of an intensive in- terrogatory into the past, present, and future of the patient. These facts about the patient's life fall under the heading of personal data or biographical information. Sullivan does not advocate a hard-and- fast, structured type of questioning which adheres to a standard list of questions. On the other hand, Sullivan insists that the interviewer should not let the patient talk about irrelevant and trivial matters.

The patient should learn that the interview is serious business and that there should be no fooling around. Nor should the interviewer ordinarily make notes of what the patient says at any time during the course of treatment because note-taking is too distracting and tends to inhibit the communication process.

Sullivan does not believe that one should start with any formal prescription to the effect "say everything that comes into your mind." Rather the therapist should take advantage of the patient's memory lapses during the interrogatory to teach him how to free-associate.

In this way, the patient not only learns how to free-associate without becoming alarmed by this unfamiliar mode of discourse but he also experiences the usefulness of the free-association technique before he has been given any formal explanation of its purpose.

By the end of the first two stages of the interview process the psychiatrist should have formed a number of tentative hypotheses regarding the patient's problems and their origins. During the period of detailed inquiry, the psychiatrist attempts to ascertain which of several hypotheses is the correct one. He does this by listening and by asking questions. Sullivan suggests a number of areas which should be inquired into—such matters as toilet training, attitude to- ward the body, eating habits, ambition, and sexual activities—but here again he does not insist upon any formal prospectus which should be rigidly followed.

As long as everything runs smoothly the interviewer is not likely 150 Theories of Personality to learn anything about the vicissitudes of interviewing, chief of which is the impact of the interviewer's attitudes upon the patient's capacity for communication. But when the communication process deteriorates, the interviewer is forced to ask himself, "What did I say or do which caused the patient to become anxious?" There is always a good deal of reciprocity between the two parties—Sullivan's term for it is reciprocal emotion--and each is continually reflecting the feel- ings of the other. It is incumbent upon the therapist to recognize and to control his own attitudes in the interest of maximum communi- cation. In other words, he should never forget his role as an expert participant observer. A series of interviews is brought to termination by the interviewer making a final statement of what he has learned, by prescribing a course for the patient to follow, and by assessing for the patient the probable effects of the prescription upon his life.

It is quite apparent from reading Sullivan's sage remarks on inter- viewing that he considers it to be an immense challenge to the ac- curacy of observation of the participant observer. The reader may be interested in contrasting the type of interviewing advocated by Sullivan with the wide variety of interviewing procedures discussed by the Maccobys (1954) and with the techniques of clinical inter- viewing set forth in the recent book, The clinical interview (1955), edited by Felix Deutsch and William Murphy.

Sullivan's principal research contribution in psychopathology con- sists of a series of articles on the etiology, dynamics, and treatment of schizophrenia. These studies were conducted for the most part during his period of association with the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Maryland and were published in psychiatric journals during the years 1924 to 1931. They reveal Sullivan's great talents for making contact with and understanding the mind of the psychotic. Empathy was a highly developed trait in Sullivan's personality, and he used it to excellent advantage in studying and treating the victims of schizophrenia. For Sullivan, these victims are not hopeless cases to be shut away in the back wards of mental institutions; they can be treated successfully if the psychiatrist is willing to be patient, under- standing, and observant.

Sullivan was also instrumental in stimulating other psychiatrists and social scientists to carry on research related to interpersonal theory. Many of these studies are reported in the journal Psychiatry, which was founded largely to promote and advance Sullivan's ideas.

Three recent books which owe a great deal to Sullivan may be men- tioned here. In Communication, the social matrix of psychiatry Social Psychological Theories 151 (1951), Ruesch and Bateson apply Sullivan's concepts to problems of human relations and to the interrelations between culture and personality. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in her influential book, Prin- ciples of intensive psychotherapy (1950), has elaborated many of Sullivan's ideas regarding the therapeutic process. The recent study of a mental hospital by Stanton and Schwartz (1954) depicts very clearly the kinds of interpersonal situations that exist in an institu- tion and the effect of these situations upon the patients and personnel alike.

Of the four theorists presented in this chapter, Sullivan's inter- personal theory has probably been the greatest stimulus to research.

One reason for this is that Sullivan employed a more objective lan- guage in describing his theory, a language which helped to span the gap between theory and observation. Sullivan kept his conceptual constructions quite closely tied to empirical observation, with the result that he seemed to be describing at close quarters the behavior of real people. In spite of the abstractness of his thought, he did not become so abstruse as to lose touch with concrete, one might almost say everyday, conduct of individuals. Interpersonal theory is a down-to-earth proposition mill which invites and encourages empirical testing.

CURRENT STATUS AND EVALUATION The four theories which have been presented in this chapter belong together because they all emphasize the influence of social variables in shaping personality. All of them, in one way or another, constitute a reaction against the instinctivist position of Freudian psychoanalysis, yet each of the theorists acknowledges his indebtedness to the seminal thinking of Freud. They have all stood on Freud's shoulders, and have added their own cubits to his towering height. They have in- vested personality with social dimensions equal if not superior in importance to the biological dimensions provided by Freud and Jung. Moreover, these theories have helped to place psychology in the sphere of the social sciences.

In spite of the common ground which they occupy each theory stresses somewhat different clusters of social variables. Erich Fromm devotes most of his attention to describing the ways in which the structure and dynamics of a particular society mold its members so that their social character fits the common values and needs of that society. Karen Horney, although she recognizes the influence of the social context in which a person lives, dwells more upon the intimate 152 Theories of Personality factors within the family setting which shape personality. In this respect, Sullivan's interpersonal theory resembles Horney's views more than it does Fromm's. For Sullivan the human relationships of infancy, childhood, and adolescence are of paramount concern, and he is most eloquent and persuasive when he is describing the nexus between the "mothering one" and the baby. Adler, on the other hand, roams widely throughout society looking for factors that are relevant to personality and finds them everywhere.

Although all four theories strenuously oppose Freud's instinct doc- trine and the fixity of human nature, none of the four adopts the radical environmentalist position that an individual's personality is created solely by the conditions of the society into which he is born.

Each theory, in its own way, agrees that there is such a thing as human nature which the baby brings with him, largely in the form of fairly general predispositions or potentialities rather than as spe- cific needs and traits. These generalized potentialities as exemplified by Adler's social interest and Fromm's need for transcendence are actualized in concrete ways by means of the formal and informal educative agencies of the society. Under ideal conditions, these theories agree, the individual and society are interdependent; the person serves to further the aims of the society and society in turn helps man to attain his goals. In short, the stand adopted by these four theorists is neither exclusively social or sociocentric nor ex- clusively psychological or psychocentric; it is truly social-psychological in character.

Furthermore, each theory not only asserts that human nature is plastic and malleable but also that society is equally plastic and malleable. If a particular society does not fulfill the demands of human nature it can be changed by man. In other words, man creates the kind of society he thinks will benefit him the most. Ob- viously, mistakes are made in developing a society and once these errors have become crystallized in the form of social institutions and customs it may be difficult to change them. Yet each theorist was optimistic regarding the possibility of change, and each in his own way tried to bring about fundamental changes in the structure of so- ciety. Adler supported social democracy, pressed for better schools, started child guidance centers, urged reforms in the treatment of criminals, and lectured widely on social problems and their cures.

Fromm and Horney through their writings and talks have pointed the way to a better society. Fromm, in particular, has spelled out some of the basic reforms that need to be made in order to achieve Social Psychological Theories 153 a sane society. Sullivan was actively engaged in trying to bring about social amelioration through the medium of international co- operation at the time of his death. All four of them in their pro- fessional capacities as psychotherapists had extensive experiences with the casualities of an imperfect social order; consequently, they spoke from personal knowledge and practical experience in their roles as critics and reformers.

Another assumption which each theory makes is that anxiety is socially produced. Man is not by nature "the anxious animal." He is made anxious by the conditions under which he lives—by the specter of unemployment, by intolerance and injustice, by the threat of war, by hostile parents. Remove these conditions, say our theorists, and the wellsprings from which anxiety gushes forth will dry up. Nor is man by nature destructive as Freud believed. He may become destructive when his basic needs are frustrated, but even under conditions of frustration other avenues such as submission or with- drawal may be taken.

All of the theories with the exception of Sullivan's also underscore the concepts of the unique individual and the creative self.

In spite of attempts by society to regiment people, each person manages to retain some degree of creative individuality. Indeed, it is by virtue of man's inherent creative powers that he is able to effect changes in society. People create different kinds of societies on different parts of the globe, and at different times in history, in part, because people are different. Man is not only creative; he is also self-conscious. He knows what he wants and he strives consciously to reach his goals.

The idea of unconscious motivation is not accorded much weight by these social-psychological theorists.

In general, the theories developed by Adler, Fromm, Homey, and Sullivan enlarged the scope of Freudian psychology by providing room for the social determinants of personality. A number of critics, however, have disparaged the originality of these social-psychological theories. They say that such theories merely elaborate upon one aspect of classical psychoanalysis, namely, the ego and its defenses.

Freud saw clearly that personality traits often represented the per- son's habitual defenses or strategies against inner and outer threats to the ego. The needs, trends, styles, orientations, personifications, dynamisms, and so forth, in the theories treated in this chapter are accommodated in Freudian theory under the heading of ego-defenses.

Therefore, these critics conclude, nothing new has been added to Freud, and a great deal has been subtracted. By reducing personality 154 Theories of Personality to the single system of the ego, the social-psychological theorist has cut the personality off from the vital springs of human behavior, springs that have their ultimate sources in the evolution of man as a species. By enlarging upon the social character of man's personality, they have alienated man from his great biological heritage.

A criticism which is sometimes voiced against the conception of man evolved by Adler, Fromm, and Karen Homey (it does not apply to Sullivan) is that it is too sugar-coated and idealistic. In a world which has been torn apart by two great wars and the threat of a third one, not to mention the many other forms of violence and irrationality that men display, the picture of a rational, self-conscious, socialized man strikes one as being singularly inappropriate and invalid. One can, of course, blame society and not man for this deplorable state of affairs, and this is what these theorists do. But then they say, or at least imply, that rational man created the kind of social arrangements which are responsible for his irrationality and unhappiness. This is the great paradox of these theories. If man is so self-conscious, so rational, and so social, why has he evolved so many imperfect social systems?

Another less devastating criticism, but one which carries more weight with psychologists as distinguished from psychoanalysts, is the failure of these social-psychological theories to specify the precise means by which a society molds its members. How does a person acquire his social character? How does he learn to be a member of society? This evident neglect of the learning process in theories which depend so heavily upon the concept of learning to account for the ways in which personality is formed is considered to be a major omission. Is it enough just to be exposed to a condition of society in order for that condition to affect the personality? Is there a mechanical stamping in of socially approved behavior and an equally mechanical stamping out of socially disapproved behavior?

Or does the person react with insight and foresight to the social milieu, selecting those features which he thinks will produce a better organization of personality and rejecting other features which he feels are inconsistent with his self-organization? For the most part these theories stand silent on the nature of the learning process, in spite of the fact that learning has been a central topic in American psychology for a good many years.

Although these social-psychological theories have not stimulated a great deal of research in comparison with some other theories, they have served to foster an intellectual climate in which social-psycho- Social Psychological Theories 155 logical research could flourish and has done so.

Social psychology is no longer the stepchild of psychology.

It is a large and exceedingly active component part in the science of psychology. Adler, Fromm, Karen Homey, and Sullivan are not solely responsible for the rise of social psychology, but their influence has been considerable. Each of them has contributed in no small measure to the picture of man as a social being. This is their great value in the contemporary scene.

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