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PARTISAN REVIEW
Intimacy is that type of situation involving two people which permits
validations of all components of personal worth. Validation of personal
worth requires a type of relationship which I call collaboration, by
which I mean clearly formulated adjustments of one's behavior to the
expressed needs of the other person in the pursuit of increasingly identical
-that is, more and more nearly mutual-satisfactions, and the main–
tenance of increasingly similar security operations.
For Sullivan, perhaps because so much of his clinical experience was
with psychotics rather than neurotics, the aim of therapy is less am–
bitious: better interpersonal relations, better communication, and
a positive direction toward goals of collaboration and of mutual
satisfaction and security. He is less impressed by the miraculous
"unique individual self" that will flower than Horney and Fromm,
and his vision of the nature of man is not so much Rousseau's un–
corrupted innocent as a neutral network of interpersonal relations,
as capable of good, bad, or indifferent functioning as a telephone
switchboard. How far it is from a tragic vision we can see in such
comments as: "When difficulties in the sex life are presented by a
patient as his reason for needing psychiatric help . . . the patient's
difficulty in living is best manifested by his very choice of this as
his peculiar problem."
Other neo-Freudians show similar optimism. Franz Alexander,
the head of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, sponsors a shorter
and more directed therapy, in line with his idea that the therapist
is not dealing with the stubborn sexual libido, but with three basic
human tendencies he has named: to receive or take, to retain, and
to give or eliminate. Clara Thompson believes with Fromm in "cre–
ative productive love," as a consequence of which she sees the
aim
of therapy as "calm self-possession," the patient "free to develop
his powers." Like Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan, she simply cannot
believe in the existence of evil. Surely a child "in a perfectly benign
environment" would not show "serious destructiveness," and any child
warped by bad parents can be readily redeemed "if a teacher, a
Boy Scout leader or some other hero of childhood presents a con–
sistently different attitude." Bruno Bettelheim, the principal of the
Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, calls on psychoanaly–
sis to emphasize "positive human emotions and motivations," and
tQ
interpret behavior in terms of "inner freedom and human auton-
