INTERPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
tion, but, especially when anxiety was aroused, a number of actions
were .also observed which made no sense in the present context. The
patient would suddenly get tired, a seemingly harmless statement
would cause him to stammer, or he would scowl in indignation while
saying nothing to convey his anger. It was later discovered that the
patient was living an imaginary relation with its roots in
th~
past, or
re-living an earlier, unresolved integration. This separation of the
paratactic relation from the syntactic is a basic approach in Sulli–
van's analysis; it also explains what is perhaps the most basic difficulty
in our relations.
Statements, gestures and other communicative devices used out
of context in present situations nearly always refer in this manner
to past relations. Carrying this idea somewhat further, Dr. Leslie
Farber has posited that we each have a highly individual language
which may be depressive, disparaging, haughty or whatever in char–
acter, depending upon the strongest trends in our conditioning. To
know a person and his language, then, is to know his whole approach
with its anxiety areas, dissociated patterns, methods of derogating
(often extremely subtle), peculiar demands-in short, the entirety
of a specific individual who is at once more unique, more differentiated
and more unified than any set of generalized symptoms based on
assumed instinctual drives would ever lead us to suppose.
The drive toward unity of self is called by Sullivan the self-dyn–
amism; it is the observable tendency of the self to unify a welter of
praise and blame in its experience with unique individuals into a
whole-to organize itself around a center of self-esteem which allows
for the full communication of its aims and desires.
As
in a good novel
or play, to know a person is to know at once the great variety of
detail he presents and its organization into a recognizably individual
oneness of being.
II
We are made
ill
by
derogation.
This simple term takes on con–
siderable depth of meaning when applied to the workings of the com–
municative process; it indicates every manner of human power–
device which breaks off a communication between freely acting and
responsible selves. It is always some form of derogation- often very
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