The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry

Compiled from a lecture series Sullivan gave near the end of his life and published in 1953, four years after his death, this book sets out the fullest version of his interpersonal account of mind. Sullivan holds that a person cannot be studied in isolation, and that psychiatry is properly the study of what passes between people. Anxiety, he argues, arrives from the mothering one and organizes the developing self, which forms security operations to keep it at bay.

He traces development across defined epochs from infancy through late adolescence, showing how personifications of self and others take shape and harden. For the therapist, the payoff is the stance of participant observation: the clinician sits inside the field being described, never a detached recorder. The concepts of the self-system, selective inattention, and consensual validation come from here, and much of relational practice still runs on them.