Harry Stack Sullivan Colloquium: The significance of ego interpretive states in insight-directed psychotherapy

I AM pleased and grateful to have the chance to speak with you on this special occasion when we can recall and evalute the contributions--conceptual, educational, and personal--which Harry Stack Sullivan made and still makes to our field and to the understanding of human living. Sullivan belonged to that group of scholars who analyzed human experience in terms of a psychology of action grounded in the philosophical basis derived from Brentano, Mead, and Dewey--and represented by Meyer. Freud and the psychoanalysts, Titchener, and most anthropologists and modern sociologists. A psychology of action includes purpose and intent in its basic terms, it recognizes the ubiquity of symbolic interpretation as characteristic of humans, and it emphasizes the importance of understanding in the sence of grasping human communication, rather than in the sense of understanding objective mechanisms. It stands in contrast to an effort at objectivity in a behaviorist sence on the one hand, and to a strictly phenomenological psychology on the other. Phenomenological and existentialist analysis consider dialogue, communion, and the sharing of experience as the source of creative novelty and discovery, and exclude classification which might, for instance, consider some persons sick and capable of recovery. The act psychologist tends to ask what the person is trying to do, whereas others would speak of a trait, a symptom, or a defect.