Today I thought I would blog about a more new to me and interesting influential figure in psychology and this person would be Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was born in New York in 1892 and he conducted work with psychoanalysis that was based on direct and verifiable evidence-(versus the more abstract conceptions of the unconscious mind more akin by Freud and his followers). Sullivan was a psychiatrist who was a helpful component of laying the groundwork for understanding a person based on the network of relationships in which he or she is involved in. Sullivan developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships where cultural influences are by and large the reason for mental illness. Interestingly what Sullivan said among his research was that loneliness was the most painful among human experiences. Sullivan extended Freud's psychoanalysis for the treatment of patients with severe mental disorders and most specifically schizophrenia. Sullivan was the first to talk about the significant other in psychological literature and he also developed the Self System. The Self System "is a configuration of the personality traits developed in childhood and reinforced by positive affirmation and the security operations developed in childhood to avoid anxiety and threats to self-esteem". Sullivan also called the Self System, a steering mechanism towards a serious of I-You interlocking behaviors; meaning what a person does is based upon eliciting a particular reaction and Sullivan referred to these behaviors as parataxic integrations. Also resulting miscalculations of a sort in judgement were known and termed by Sullivan as parataxic distortions when other people are perceived or examined based on the patterns of previous experience. Sullivan's research on interpersonal relationships became the foundation of interpersonal psychoanalysis, which is a branch of psychoanalytic theory and treatment that emphasizes the specific exploration of the types of different patient patterns of interacting among others. There is no doubt in my mind Sullivan was a brilliant psychiatrist, delving in and influencing psychoanalysis greatly in his prominent career.