Interpersonal Behavior

History and Practice of Personality Theory

Robert Carson, Benjamin Netanyahu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780202363257
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351511803
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book represents an inquiry into an area of human behavior at once fascinating and exasperating. It is fascinating because it is a class of behavior that, while peculiarly resistant to cognitive analysis and clarification it remains, for most of us throughout our lives, a subjectively crucial issue. In Interpersonal Behavior Carson analyzes, describes, and explains the transactions that occur between persons. The analysis focuses upon the smallest possible unit of social interaction, the dyad, or two-person group.

This book is as important today as when it first appeared in 1969 because it forces us to recognize that attributions to others are incomplete without reference to the circumstances in which a particular behavior occurs. Carson posits that, while personality characteristics may not be ephemeral, any observed stability is the product of whatever propensities can accurately be identified as existing "inside" the person, and the interpersonal situation in which they are expressed. Carson urges us to examine more carefully the effect of noncomplementarity on what appears to be stable personality characteristics.

Carson introduces us to the principal interpersonal theorists in a series of expository chapters that are both lucid and authoritative. His long experience as a clinical psychologist enables him to make a telling application of interaction concepts of personality to the field of mental and emotional "illness." He makes clear that many people designated as "mental patients" have suffered real harm because they are perceived as having a "diseased" personality, rather than as people who, under certain circumstances, behave deviantly.

CHAPTER 1


Introduction

This book represents an excursion—or, to use a perhaps slightly more dignified term, an inquiry—into an area of human behavior at once fascinating and exasperating. Fascinating because it is a class of behavior that, while peculiarly resistant to cognitive analysis and clarification, is nevertheless for most of us the subjectively crucial issue throughout our lives. It is exasperating for the same reasons. It is with some humility, then, that I have attempted herein to analyze, describe, and to some extent explain the transactions that occur between persons. As will shortly become clear, I think that in so doing we can account for a great deal of what is ordinarily meant by the term personality. The analysis focuses upon the smallest possible unit of social interaction, the dyad, or two-person group, because to do otherwise would severely tax the author’s—if not the reader’s—capacity for scholarship and abstract thought. Insofar as any larger group of persons is reducible to dyadic units, the concepts examined here might have a greater range of applicability, but we will generally ignore these more extended implications.

The reader with some knowledge of personality theory will already know that the major intellectual forebear of this book is the eminent American psychiatrist and social scientist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), whose thinking we will have occasion to consider in some detail in Chapter 2. This is, however, only in small degree a book about Sullivan’s theories. It is his fundamental conception of personality in terms of interpersonal processes, in the broadest sense, with which we are mainly concerned. Beyond that, an attempt will be made to reformulate Sullivanian conceptions into a more systematic framework, one more firmly tied to observable events, or at least to empirically testable hypotheses. This is a project, it might be noted, of which Sullivan himself would almost certainly have approved. It should be acknowledged at the outset, however, that, despite rapid advances in the social sciences in the past two decades, the goal is an exceedingly ambitious one and will necessarily fall considerably short of complete success. We are in an area of the most intimidating complexity, where empirically valid generalizations are not easily established or formulated, and where investigators are themselves a long way from the development of a commonly shared language and concept-system. To some extent, this book represents an integrative effort. It is an eclectic selection of concepts and relevant empirical findings that seem to provide a relatively systematic, although incomplete, account of socially significant personal conduct.

Sullivan was fundamentally a clinician, and so am I. It may be appropriate, therefore, to provide the reader with a brief example of the kind of observation of behavior—readily accessible to any clinician, and indeed to many who are not—that is likely to lead one to think of personality in interpersonal terms. The example will also serve as a useful reference point to illustrate concepts to be introduced later. I have chosen the example from Sullivan, whose inimitable style of clinical description surpasses anything that I could offer from my own experience. Sullivan is here introducing some comments about what he calls the “hysteric dynamism”:

Let us say that a man (call him Mr. X) with a strong hysterical predisposition has married, perhaps for money, and that his wife, thanks to his rather dramatic and exaggerated way of doing and saying things, cannot long remain in doubt that there was a very practical consideration in this marriage and cannot completely blind herself to a certain lack of importance that she has in her husband’s eyes. So she begins to get even. She may, for example, like someone I recently saw, develop a never-failing vaginismus, so that there is no more intercourse for him. And he will not ruminate on whether this vaginismus that is cutting off his satisfaction is directed against him, for the very simple reason that if you view interpersonal phenomena with that degree of objectivity, you can’t use an hysterical process to get rid of your own troubles. So he won’t consider that; but he will suffer terribly from privation and will go to rather extravagant lengths to overcome the vaginismus that is depriving him of satisfaction, the lengths being characterized by a certain rather theatrical attention to detail rather than deep scrutiny of his wife. But he fails again and again. Then one night, when he is worn out, and perhaps has had a precocious ejaculation in his newest adventure in practical psychotherapy, he has the idea, “My God, this thing is driving me crazy,” and goes to sleep.

Now the idea, “This thing is driving me crazy,” is the happy idea that I say the hysteric has. He wakes up at some early hour in the morning, probably at the time when his wife is notoriously most soundly asleep, and he has a frightful attack of some kind. It could be literally almost anything, but it will be very impressive to anyone around. His wife will be awakened, very much frightened, and will call the doctor. But before the doctor gets there, the husband, with a fine sense of dramatic values, will let her know in some indirect way that he’s terribly afraid he is losing his mind. She is reduced to a really agitated state by that. So when the doctor comes, the wife is in enough distress—in part because of whatever led to her vaginismus—to wonder if she might lose her own mind, and the husband is showing a good many odd symptoms. And the doctor probably doesn’t know anything about losing minds anyway, and so he begins to wonder if he is going to lose his mind. But presently things quiet down.

Now let us say that the doctor in this case is a high-grade but somewhat inexperienced psychiatrist and that he sets out to get the history of the immediate situation from which this business grew. He might get an awful lot of details—details about distressing situations in the office, the terrible strain that the husband has been under from the pressure of his work—all of them within the limits of ordinary human plausibility as a basis for a quite nervous condition. And, of course, he would learn how very useful the wife has been in sort of protecting the husband from these things and in giving him as much rest and quiet as possible. But there will be no comment about anything else—no faintest suspicion of anything the least bit out of the way in the sex life. Even if our somewhat inexperienced psychiatrist, suspecting that there is possibly something a little bit off in the sex life somewhere, pushes hard in that area, he won’t get any very good leads. So he will probably prescribe sedatives and a rest or a change of scene or some other damn thing, and hope for the best. (Sullivan, 1956, pp. 204–206) ¹

What is going on here? With the benefit of Sullivan’s notable abilities as a raconteur, the general outlines are fairly clear. We see a mutually punitive interaction, in which Mrs. X retaliates with satisfaction-deprivation for her husband’s exploitative indifference to her, and is herself victimized by her husband in counter-retaliation. This entire transaction takes place on a level of communication where it is unnecessary, and perhaps impossible, for the parties involved to acknowledge their participation. Even a reasonably sophisticated third party, as Sullivan notes, might not be able to identify readily the particular interactional patterns of this marital situation. And this despite the fact that interpersonal difficulties of this order of magnitude are, generally speaking, relatively transparent.

The disorders of interpersonal relations that are likely to come to the attention of professional helpers are magnified, so to speak, and therefore more readily observable than the more subtle transactions that characterize all of our daily lives. It is probably for this reason that most of the major systems of personality theory, including the interpersonal, have had their origins in clinical practice. It is for this reason too that many of the illustrations provided in this book depict “clinical” phenomena. But the reader should be alert that illustrations of concepts, however dramatic, do not constitute proof of the utility or validity of those concepts, a point that has seldom been appreciated in the literature of personality theory. We shall have to be wary of the seductive but logically weak tendency to attribute validity to an idea on the basis of a seemingly compelling, and perhaps esoteric, anecdote from real life. Scientific rules of evidence are generally more stringent, and we shall strive here to approximate these more stringent requirements.

Where does this leave us in regard to the case of Mr. and Mrs. X, who are, after all, mythical persons? In fact, this particular example was chosen partly because it is fiction, albeit one whose essential features occur commonly enough in the real world. The example is manifestly not offered as proof of anything, either here or on the subsequent occasions when we will refer to it. You will recall, rather, that the case of Mr. and Mrs. X was introduced as an example of a type of phenomenon which contributed very greatly to the development of interactional conceptions in the study of personality. With these caveats in mind, then, let us return very briefly to a consideration of this unfortunate couple. There are just one or two more points to be made.

It would appear that the essential causes of Mr. and Mrs. X’s current difficulties with one another antedate the situation itself, and very probably even their first premarital encounter. We are given to understand that Mr. X is a generally self-absorbed and opportunistic person, and Sullivan suggests that Mrs. X had some prior propensity to react to the situation in the specific manner in which she did—that is, by having an attack of vaginismus which would abruptly terminate Mr. X’s sexual satisfaction with her. Can it be that the presumably long-standing personal characteristics of these two persons were such as to insure beforehand the occurrence of the particular events recorded here, and that the events themselves are merely the natural and logical outcome of a sustained relationship between two such people? An affirmative answer to this question would not be completely erroneous, but the question is itself a deceptively oversimplified one. One wishes to know, for example, how these two persons convinced themselves to arrange their lives together in the institutionalized form of marriage, or what it is that energizes and maintains Mr. X’s generalized orientation toward exploitation of others, or why Mrs. X “chooses” the particular form of retaliation she does, or simply why it is that the two of them seem unable or unwilling to clarify consensually what is going on between them, a clarification that might lead to a more objectively satisfactory accord. This is the level of question to which this entire book is addressed. For the present, we will leave Mr. and Mrs. X behind in order to prepare the groundwork for a more comprehensive and systematic perspective from which to view them.

Orientation and Rationale

Because this book departs somewhat from traditional treatments of the subject matter of personality, it seems necessary to give a measure of explicit attention to the predilections and assumptions that constitute its conceptual substrate. This discussion will also serve to delimit the scope and the principal analytical foci of the field of investigation to which our attention will be directed in the following pages.

The Nature of Psychology

The definition of an intellectual discipline at any point in time is almost necessarily presumptuous, and for this reason there will be no formal attempt to do so here. The reader, however, may harbor definitions of his own, and I am more than a little concerned that these may be unduly restrictive, in which case some of what I want to say may run a considerable risk of being regarded as something other than psychology. Contemporary definitions of psychology almost invariably assert, in one way or another, that it is the study of behavior. Now, this is a quite reasonable definition, and it is one to which, as a matter of fact, I subscribe. Difficulties often arise, however, in the elucidation of this definition. The founding fathers of modern psychology, among whom there were some truly outstanding men, have, because of their efforts to build an objective science, exerted an unwarranted determining influence upon contemporary psychology and psychologists. The imposition of a rigid behaviorism in accounting for how organisms come to do whatever they do seems to me to be epistemologically unnecessary, an anachronism that has long since served its function of sensitizing us to the intellectual perils of “subjectivity” and “mentalistic” concepts. Behaviorism in its purest and most radical form—exelusive concern with overt, observable events—seems to me to insure a psychology that is sterile, especially in regard to human behavior, which is of course the focus of our attention. Some readers will undoubtedly feel that the uncompromising behaviorism described here is no longer a consequential force in psychology, hence undeserving of my attack. It is indeed true that the qualifications for being identified as a behaviorist have been relaxed considerably in recent years. Nevertheless, it seems necessary for me to be clear at the outset that an individual’s reflections about his and others’ behavior are significant data. I find it essential to examine a person’s behavior in the light of his constructs of the events impinging on him.

Having said this, it now becomes necessary to introduce a correction factor at the other end, so to speak. I do not believe that a science can be founded on subjective, private experience. Ultimately, we do need the anchor of objective, publicly observable behavioral events. This requirement, however, does not preclude our making inferences about the subjective experiences and other unobservable aspects of the persons whose behavior we study; and we shall especially wish to do so when such inferences are helpful in explaining and predicting behavioral phenomena. It will be well, however, to be especially cautious about inferences of this kind, recognizing the temptation to substitute our own private experiences for those of our subjects.

The Nature of Personality

The concept subsumed by the term personality is an ancient one, probably as old as man, qua man, himself. To what kinds of observations does it refer? Quite simply it refers to the regularities or consistencies that characterize a given individual’s behavioral repertoire; these regularities are believed somehow to distinguish the individual as a person and to render his behavior predictable. Now, there are several ways in which behavioral regularity, consistency, or predictability might plausibly be explained, and virtually all of them have at one time or another been advanced as a theory of what we call personality. Let us consider some of these. Insects exhibit marked regularities in behavior on the basis of inherited capacities for reaction patterns. Is it possible that this is analogous to personality at the human level? But insects of a given species all seem to be pretty much alike, whereas we tend to associate personality with some degree of distinctiveness and individuality. In order to account for personality as an inherited reaction pattern, we would need to postulate some indeterminate number of possible inheritable patterns. This strategy has in fact been tried quite a number of times in the history of human thinking about personality, never with any great success in predicting or accounting for the behavior of persons.

One of the difficulties of the more simple varieties of what might be called inherited disposition theories of the origins of personality is that they tend to suggest a permanent and static quality—a relatively invariant structural foundation—for such regularity as may exist in the behavior of a person. We know from experience, however, that persons change throughout their lives, and that quite dramatic alterations of characteristic behavior may be brought about by radical changes in the “stimulus” circumstances of the external environment, in prisoner-of-war camps, for example. Observations of this kind have so impressed some theorists, indeed, that they have championed an almost diametrically opposite viewpoint on the nature of personality. According to this conception, such regularities as may exist in an individual’s behavior arise not from any internal characteristics he may possess, but rather from the tendency of a person’s environment to make uniform or consistent demands upon him. One form of this point of view, a sociological one, asserts that personality is nothing more than the constellation of a person’s social roles. This is an intriguing approach, and in one form or another it has led to a great deal of creative research. We may ask, however, if it will account in itself for the range of phenomena with which we are concerned. The answer seems to be that it will not. Individual differences in behavior typically remain salient in the face of quite powerful and uniform environmental demand characteristics—in the military s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sullivan’s Conceptions: Beginnings of a System
• 3 Learning Interpersonal Behavior
• 4 Varieties of Interpersonal Behavior
• 5 Negotiating Interpersonal Transactions
• 6 Contractual Arrangements in Interpersonal Relations
• 7 “Personality Disorder”: Extranormative Efforts at Relationship
• 8 Psychotherapy: Disorder-Reducing Interpersonal Relationships
• Name Index
• Subject Index