Interpersonal Psychoanalysis - Personifications

Personifications

Sullivan emphasized that psychotherapists' analyses should focus on patients' relationships and personal interactions to obtain knowledge of affecting patterns and tendencies - personifications. Such analyses would consist of detailed questioning regarding moment-to-moment personal interactions, even including those with the analyst himself.

For Sullivan, 'personifications embody one's assumptions, schemata, internalised representations of others and reflected appraisals of the self'. They can form the basis for 'the later ambiguities in interpersonal relations that Sullivan termed parataxic distortion...a very similar concept to the standard psychoanalytic transference/projection mechanisms'.

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