Close Relationships

Abstract

Fifty years ago, clinical psychology in North America discovered close relationships. Karen Homey (1939) challenged instinctual, individualistic psychoanalysis with a social view of neuroses as “determined ultimately by disturbances in human relationships” (p. 78). Harry Stack Sullivan (1950), drawing on the ideas of George Herbert Mead and Edward Sapir (Part I), declared that individual personality is an illusion and that “we really do have to study interpersonal relations to know what we are talking about when we talk about difficulties in living” (p. 329); for Sullivan, the mental health professional must be an expert in interpersonal relations. What started as dissident views are now central to attachment and object relations theories, as mentioned in the last chapter. Homey and Sullivan recognized the role of relationships not only in the origins of psychopathology but in its treatment; for them, the therapist was not a blank screen or passive observer, but a wholehearted participant in a close relationship.