Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal theory emphasized the role of interpersonal relationships, social development and culture in the formation of personality. His social psychologically based theory was among the earliest and most cogent critiques of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic drive theory and his psychosexual developmental theory. Sullivan posited that the human development arose out of a need for interpersonal relatedness more than satisfaction of drives, well before Bowlby’s important discoveries regarding attachment. Sullivan’s stages of human development involved meeting important psychosocial tasks, which in turn characterized the individual’s personality.
Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst working in the 1930s and 1940s, was the founder and chief proponent of a model of psychoanalytic thinking called variously.
