Harry Stack Sullivan Quotes

“Sullivan discussed two other ways to cope with the anxiety about sexual performance that emerged in early adolescence. First, the adolescent could withdraw from attempts to meet both lust and intimacy through social isolation. The isolated adolescent used reverie (daydreams, phantasies, and dreams) as a substitution for interpersonal experience. While such methods could be initially useful, the isolated adolescent could eventually retreat permanently into the safety of this method of need discharge. Changes could occur in the reverie process, creating highly idealized, imaginary companions which posed a severe barrier to meeting others, while making it difficult to break down obstacles in reaching out to real and imperfect intimate others, leading to what Sullivan called the schizoid problem. Second, if the lust dynamism appeared before the adolescent achieved isophilic intimacy, the chronic juvenile pattern led to a need to be envied and a competitive, non-intimate stance regarding lust manifested itself as being, in the juvenile male adolescent, a Don Juan or ladies' man or, in the juvenile female adolescent, a "teaser.”
― F. Barton Evans III, Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory and Psychotherapy