Harry Stack Sullivan, “The Data of Psychiatry” (1938)

I want to comment on the article’s opening, metapsychological remarks. Here Sullivan identifies the proper “object” of that branch of science called psychiatry: a constellation indicated by the cognates “person,” “personal,” “personality,” and — as it happens — “interpersonal.” With these remarks, Sullivan reveals something  about his theoretical position regarding, not only the differentia of psychiatry and its special object, but scientific inquiry more generally.

The article’s first sentences stipulate: “Psychiatry as a science is concerned with the thinking and doings of persons, real and illusory. Everything personal is data for psychiatry, and relevant exactly to the extent that it is personal” (7). We will immediately note several peculiarities of Sullivan’s technical language, which is often introduced without elaboration. First, by “personal” Sullivan appears simply to mean, ‘pertaining to persons,’ and emphatically not the term’s colloquial associations. In many contexts, that is, the “personal” connotes what is most private — ‘That’s too personal to discuss in public’ — and, as a rule, idiosyncratic to the person in question. But just these associations must be kept to one side, since for Sullivan they are precisely not the objects with which his science deals. As he will emphasize, psychiatry is in this respect no exception to the rule of every science, since it, too, investigates objects in their universality. The physicist and biologist treat their electron and cat, not under the aspect of their non-fungible uniqueness, but as vehicles of universal types, structures, and laws (8).

Second, when Sullivan writes that data is “relevant” to psychiatry “exactly to the extent that it is personal,” he is suggesting that even ostensibly non-personal factors — say, the “subpersonal” (7) of human biology, or the “impersonal” (7) of culture — fall under psychiatry’s purview inasmuch as they inform, or follow from, the “personal” in the strict sense. The biological substrate of human beings — the direct concern of biology — nevertheless bears in predictable ways on “personal” thoughts and behavior, while also “signifying” personal states to the observer. (Later in the article, Sullivan illustrates these connections by imagining the subtle biological and physiological changes undergone by the subject of a hypothetical clinical case, “Mr. A,” in response to an interaction with his wife, “Mrs. A” (15-16).) Likewise, the structures and patterns examined by social scientists will connect with the “personal” — the characteristics of “persons” — in ways that psychiatry may isolate. Institutions and culture are, after all, in the first instance products of “persons” and the enduring arena of the “personal” — even if they also enjoy a kind of autonomy with respect to their participants, or “persons.”

Third, we are told that psychiatry’s content is “the thinking and doings of persons, real and illusory.” Here again, Sullivan uses a common word — illusory — in ways that depart from convention. I may dip a straight rod into a pool of water and create the illusion that it is bent — a distorting perception that misrepresents reality as it is, or at least as it’s normally perceived. Other types of illusion, too — the desert mirage, the outright hallucination — share this property of misrepresenting reality, since they are perceptions that either correspond to nothing real, or correspond to something real in a questionable way. Yet when Sullivan contrasts “real and illusory” in his opening stipulation, it is unclear whether he has these conventional meanings in mind.

In fact, the “illusory” phenomena that recur in the article are not always, or even usually agents of reality-misrepresentation of the kind the word may lead us to expect. The “illusory persons” in Mr. A’s mind, each of which represents to Mr. A one “face” of someone with whom he has a manifestly vital, “real” relationship — these are hardly figments of imagination, at least in most scenarios, but rather the normal ways in which individuals appear to one another. Indeed, we must appear to one another in this way: as “parts” of ourselves based on histories of specific interpersonal configurations. If “illusion” is nevertheless an apt expression in this context, it is perhaps to the extent that these self- and other-images, which may legitimately capture a side, or several, of the dramatis personae in our interpersonal lives, are on occasion construed as the total truth. These persons are illusory in a quite restricted sense: the illusion consists in our mistaking “part” of the experience or person for the “whole.”

After introducing these stipulations, however, Sullivan further restricts the focus of psychiatry to its proper object: “The primary concern of psychiatry as a science…is relatively narrow. Psychiatry seeks to discover and formulate the laws of human personality” (8). The third of our cognates, following “person” and “the personal,” human “personality” appears to designate the abstract structure, organization, or pattern common to all persons, the functioning of which is fundamentally “lawful.” This does not mean, of course, that all persons are the same, or that this shared structure appears in each instance as identical. But it does mean that the same universal ingredients, mechanisms, and principles of personality will apply in every individual. To introduce an analogy: though bodies in space are uniquely constituted — this stone is rather unlike that table — each submits to the same gravitational laws.

While his approach to the subject has been novel — including the uncommon use of common vocabulary — Sullivan has not yet, as far as I can tell, departed much from precedent. I imagine the typical psychiatrist — or rather, the psychologist — could with a little effort recognize her method, activities, and object in Sullivan’s descriptions of the science. At this point, however, Sullivan re-describes the psychiatric arena in a way that probably would strike his contemporaries as innovative. What are the “laws of personality,” after all, and where are they to be found? Psychiatry’s “peculiar field,” Sullivan writes, “is the study of interpersonal phenomena. Personality is made manifest in interpersonal situations, not otherwise. It is to the elucidation of interpersonal relations, therefore, that psychiatry applies itself” (8).

Both the balance of his metapsychological remarks and the hypothetical clinical vignette that follows help to clarify the content and implications of this innovate re-description of psychiatry. That psychiatry investigates “persons” and the “personal,” and that the “laws of personality” are in this way uncovered — this is essentially uncontroversial. But that this program involves us necessarily in the interpersonal, and, beyond this, exclusively in the interpersonal — this is controversial. And the meaning, let alone the validity of this amendment are far from self-evident.

The personality whose laws we wish to identify is neither “observed directly” (8) nor, as we already indicated, a “unique individuality” (8). Again, this description applies per definition to scientific objects: the researcher is not interested in (a) the “sensible” or (b) the suis generis “particular,” except as bearers of lawful regularities that are themselves neither sensible nor particular. The personality is in these respects no different from any other scientific object, which the “correct view of personality” (8) recognizes as a “hypothetical entity” that psychiatry “postulates to account for the doings of people, one with another, and with more or less personified objects” (8). (“Personification” now enters Sullivan’s account as another cognate.)

Here Sullivan flags the error that overtakes psychiatry — “the very mother of illusions” (8) — the moment it ignores these stipulations: it loses itself in “the traditionally emphasized individuality of each of us” (8), an approach entangled with “preconceptions that invalidate almost all our efforts to understand other people” (8). These “delusions of unique individuality” (8) include centrally the false notion of a person as “a self-limited unit that alternates between a state of insular detachment and varying degrees of contact with other people and with cultural entities” (8). (In these lines, Sullivan deviates from his pattern and restores to the words “illusion” and “delusion” the more common meaning of “false belief.”)

The last assertion, taken as the culmination of even a loose argument, strikes me as a logical non sequitur. We may agree entirely with the position that (a) scientific knowledge abstracts from the particularities of sense-experience; hence (b) psychiatry as a science treats its object, personality, as a hypothetical, non-sensible postulate governed by universal laws; and still imagine — as least in principle — that (c) “personality” entails persons as “self-limited unit[s]” who behave with others, and culture more generally, in the way Sullivan facetiously describes. Both the atomism of individual partes extra partes and the holism of Sullivan’s dynamic configurations may involve postulating a non-sensible, generic “personality.” In other words, Sullivan’s conceptions of the person, the personal, and personality do not perforce demand the “interpersonal” turn that he now gives to all three — even if his language presents it as a sound inference. Better, then, to receive the comment not as the culmination of an argument, but as an assertion to be illustrated — though not, perhaps, deduced — in the article.