My 1967 Article On Interpersonal Relationships
My 1967 Article On Interpersonal Relationships
Bernard Pyron
In 1966 or 1967 - forty-seven or forty-eight years ago - I wrote an article on interpersonal relationships which was published in a social psychology journal in 1967. The article is really about the heterosexual relationship, though it can be applied to any two person relationship. The ideas I used in the article reflect the personality and social psychology of the sixties, some of which is outdated. For example, my approach to accuracy of interpersonal perception, an interest of personality and social psychologists in the sixties, was based on the social psychology of accuracy of interpersonal perception as related to the complexity of the perceiver’s cognitive capability. The influence on my 1967 paper included the work of James Bieri, published in 1955, on cognitive complexity and accuracy of interpersonal perception, Ivan D. Steiner’s work on interpersonal relations influenced by accuracy of social perception, 1955, Bernard Farber’s factor analysis of “elements” of competence in interpersonal relations, 1962 and my own experiment on accuracy of interpersonal perception as determined by consistency of information, in which I manipulated the consistency of the target person to be predicted, published in 1965. This line of theory and research was typical of the work in the sixties before attribution theory became popular in personality and social psychology.
I use some academic verbiage in this 1967 article in a peer review journal that I would not use today.
My discussion of romantic love and of adjustment, success and monogamic sufficiency in the 1967 paper are outdated and now I would write something like this.
In 1966 and 1967 the Madison, Wisconsin University scene was into the beginnings of the changes that the counterculture made in culture and in the American heterosexual relationship. Especially for educated people, the counterculture made the heterosexual relationship less idealistic and less controlled by abstract expectations from society, while at the same time the counterculture brought in a loss of morality in the relationship and all that eventually increased the divorce rate.
Even in the fifties the expectations were that in the heterosexual relationship men were to be active, while women were to be more passive. The woman had to wait for the man to ask her out on a date with him. Usually in the fifties women did not ask men to marry them. But many of the counterculture people moved toward a type of heterosexual relationship in which men and women were to have equal roles, so that it became acceptable for the woman to be active in creating a relationship and in initiating meetings of the two. In other words, the conventional idea of the different roles of the man and the woman in a relationship was beginning to be changed by many in on the fringes of the counterculture in 1966-1967.
At the University of Wisconsin in 1966-67 some women undergraduate and graduate students were much more active in creating heterosexual relationships with men and in initiating meetings with them than similar women wold have done ten years earlier in the fifties. But these women who were more active in the heterosexual relationship often dumped their boy friends and got into relationships with other men. This is where the heterosexual liberation movement of the mid to late sixties went against basic Biblical morality. Clearly, leaving one’s spouse, whether the couple has gone through a marriage ceremony and has a marriage license from the beast government or not, is against Biblical morality.
”Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Matthew 19: 6
"And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife." I Corinthians 7: 10-11
"He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness," Matthew 19: 18
If a couple who breaks up after a few weeks together is not seen as being spouses to one another, then I Corinthians 6: 13, 18 applies. “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body………..Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body.” Many people within the heterosexual liberation movement then went from one heterosexual relationship to another.
A few years ago I corresponded by E Mail with Michael William Doyle, who wrote Free Radicals and is co-editor of Imagine
Nation, essays on the counterculture. Doyle says “The trick to writing about the Sixties counterculture, I think, is in how you define this “movement” in way that is coherent and plausibly differentiates it from the other, more conventional social movements with which it is inextricably intertwined.” The heterosexual liberation movement which began alongside and within the counterculture’s watering holes and in some major universities in the early to mid sixties was one of such “more conventional social movements” intertwined with the Hippie and Drug movements which were at the core of the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Many men and women in that early heterosexual liberation movement did not use LSD, nor were they regular pot smokers. Many of them dressed conventionally and, for the most part, were straight and intelligent undergraduate and graduate students.
But this heterosexual liberation movement spread after the mid sixties to millions of young people of a broader American culture, and for this reason it is important. For many young people after about 1965, the heterosexual relationship was changed from the way it was in the fifties.
It is interesting, though, to see something I wrote about 48 years ago and have not read in over 30 years.
"Who am I? What unique combination of objects, places, and people have I loved or hated so much that these attachments make me what ‘I am? "Who I am" can be experienced freshly and momentarily in a concrete act of relatedness to another person. The "Who I am" in relation to objects, places, and other people I have known—the music I have enjoyed, the art that I have met or have created, the philosophy and theory I have absorbed and worked with—lives more vividly in the momentary experience of relatedness to another. Relatedness at a given moment in time may inspire in the other a sensitivity to my feelings, moods, attitudes, voice quality, facial expression, and the expression in my eyes. And this sensitivity to me on the part of the other is sent back to me and helps me experience "Who I am." "Who I am" is partly learned in relation to someone else. But when we try to impose upon these spontaneous happenings in human relationships a belief of what relatedness should be, ought to be, or what we want it to be, we are destroying the possibility of fully experiencing the spontaneous moments of relatedness to another. Relatedness at a given moment in time may inspire in the other a sensitivity to my feelings, moods, attitudes, voice quality, facial expression, and the expression in my eyes. And this sensitivity to me on the part of the other is sent back to me and helps me experience "Who I am."
"Who I am" is partly learned in relation to someone else. But when we try to impose upon these spontaneous happenings in human relationships a belief of what relatedness should be, ought to be, or what we want it to be, we are destroying the possibility of fully experiencing the spontaneous moments of relatedness. If one worries about his failure to achieve relatedness to another, he is less likely to achieve success in two-person relationships. Being overly concerned in a painfully self-conscious way about failure to achieve heightened relatedness is nearly always self-defeating and destructive of human relationships. And when we categorize and classify the other as a twenty-year-old, a philosophy major, a Methodist, an Irishman or a Jew, or according to one of our friend’s description of the other, we are separate.
One reason of our failure to relate emotionally to others is the attitude of painful self-consciousness. Self-consciousness makes us separate from others, alone and isolated in our conceptualization of ourselves. But this attitude can lead to a conceptual and rational analysis of the two-person relationship. A rational understanding of human relationships may help individuals develop attitudes and skills which will lead them to achieve more rewarding relations if, in the moment of relatedness, self-consciousness can be discarded, and if the rational attitudes are fully integrated with feeling and action. In accord with this orientation, the present paper is an attempt to state some of the conditions which, when achieved, will increase mutual reward in two-person relationships. It is an “if-then” type of theory. If these conditions, which are attitudes and skills inherent in the two persons, are achieved to a maximum degree, then it is more probable that the relationship will be mutually rewarding. By reward I mean satisfaction of basic needs, including the need for novelty, identity, relatedness, and mutual trust. The conditions which follow can be applied to all two-person relationships: parent-child, male-male, female-female, and adult heterosexual relationships. Since failure in marriage is perhaps the most damaging interpersonal relationship failure in our society, most of the emphasis will be on marriage relationships.
The marriage contract involves a commitment to continue rewarding the other. A marriage partner who fails in this commitment often experiences guilt because of his failure to reward the other for whom he is responsible. The statistical fact that one in three marriages end in divorce is only, the most obvious indication of heterosexual relationship failure in our society. Those who fail to achieve relatedness in marriage but stay married often suffer every variety of unhappiness, anxiety, worry, boredom, and psychosomatic disease. These symptoms may result from a conflict between rebellion against the marriage commitment and a desire to adjust to an imperfect situation. Several contemporary myths have been incorporated into the
American institution of marriage, and it is my hypothesis that “these myths do much to prevent the achievement of the conditions that are necessary for mutual and lasting reward in marriage.
The Myth of Romantic Love
The myth of romantic love—where two selves who think they are highly individualized and who think they are just right for each other but who soon come to be isolated from each other and thus seek greater togetherness in a superficial way—has become our current ideal of romantic love. In longing for love, the adolescent or adult idealizes the love relationship and creates in his imagination an ideal mate which he will never find. When the boy or girl actually begins a relationship with a real member of the opposite sex, he or she may see the other through these idealized dimensions. The communication and love that may be felt is not real but due to idealization, which serves the person’s need for perfection and eternal devotion resulting from affection deprivation.
As the relationship continues, there may occur a deep-felt disappointment because the other does not live up to expectations. The ideal heterosexual relationship is now a part of the mythic structure of contemporary American life because it serves a deep need of individuals. The ideal love relationship is now a myth since, like other myths, it expresses a longing for an impossible and unachievable condition. Although our women’s magazines devote a considerable amount of paper to the elaboration of part of the myth, it is not an adequate myth for inspiring marriage love. It is without embodiment in a system of concepts and facts about human relationships, and the myth of romantic love is not really part of a faith whose function would be to bring the individual personality into an emotional and perceptual relationship to other people and the physical environment.
A number of writers have discussed the myth of romantic love which began with the troubadours of the Middle Ages and became a tradition in the West, for example, Evans, 1, 1953, Ellis and Harper, 1, 1961 and Hayakawa, 1, 1957. To the extent that this myth is based on localization, the desire to sutler in love, me notion mat people have a dire need for love, possessiveness, and so forth, it is unrealistic. The romantic love myth does inspire some feeling of love between people, but it is a superficial myth which generates failure experiences in both premarital and marital relationships on too wide a scale. And yet this widespread failure experience can be an instigation to change the myth.
The Myths of Adjustment, Success and Monogamic Sufficiency
Linder, 2, 1952, has suggested that our society is dominated by what he calls the “eleventh commandment,” “thou shall be adjusted.” The myth of adjustment requires that individuals conform to their environmental situation, to passively accept things as they are, rather than actively try to change them. The current version of the myth of adjustment applied to the marriage situation is based on the attitude of powerlessness. The individual is thought to be powerless to change his present state. Even though his relationship with his mate leaves much to be desired, even though he may feel that his life is in a rut, that he is missing out on something vital in life, he is supposed to accept his situation since he is thought to be powerless. Thus, the myth of adjustment might be seen as a kind of medicine to be used to counteract the unrealistic interpersonal aspiration fostered by the myth of romantic love. The myth of romantic love offers the individual complete fulfillment and happiness through heterosexual relationships, and when these idealized expectations are not achieved, the individual feels that he is a failure. A common response to failure is to resign oneself and to defend against an overwhelming sense of failure by feeling that one’s situation is the fault of the social order, of chance, of fate, or the influence of other, more powerful people. Since the individual is powerless to change the social order and also to change his relationship with his mate, he must, according to the myth of adjustment, accept his situation. As long as people feel power-less to change their marital situation, little change is apt to come about. A major source of conflict in marriage results from people’s
failure to fully accept the myth of adjustment.
The conflict is between passively adjusting and actively seeking to build a new type of relationship. Another current American myth which has been incorporated into the institution of marriage is that of success. This is Western man’s basic need for achievement. In American culture this involves a need for position, influence, respect, and, above all, economic power. Since few are able to achieve success in this sense, since their aspirations are higher than their chances for success, they develop a deep sense of failure. A man may feel 1 that he is a failure, and his wife may also feel he is a failure. These feelings often become highly disruptive of marriage relationships A man who is a failure, especially among other men, [ will likely be a failure in his relationship with his wife as long as both have a high need for success. And again, a conflict results because an increasing number of people are coming to question the value of the American myth of achievement. Many feel that it not only offers hollow goals, but leads to a hopeless rat race. But one must have a certain amount of financial power and influence to function in American society. Hence the basic conflict.
The third myth which is another source of conflict in marriage is the notion that the married couple is emotionally sufficient in themselves. The idea that the married couple is a sufficient social unit and may remain emotionally isolated from others is an imposition upon the reality of many present day marriage relationships. The achievement of emotional sufficiency is a noble goal, but when sufficiency is imposed where it does not, in fact, exist, conflicts result. Sufficiency can exist only when the couple is able to maintain a high level of mutual reward. When mutual reward is low, conflict results because the imposed myth of monogamic sufficiency clashes with the desire to relate to individuals (male and female) other than the marriage partner.
A Rational Model of Mutually Rewarding Relationships
When individuals do not hold strongly to the myths of romantic love, adjustment and success, and are able to meet to a minimal degree the conditions of communication, complexity of interpersonal perception, and absence of high affection drive, the marriage relationship may be superior to many existing relationships. It should be emphasized, however, that I do not intend to imply that these three conditions are all the conditions that are required for mutually rewarding relationships. There arc many other important conditions.
Condition 1: Authentic Communication of Self
If one wishes to change the other’s perception of him so that the other will reward him to a greater degree, he must be able to accurately communicate his feelings and attitudes to the other. When both individuals say exactly what they feel and do not attempt to deceive the other, a feeling of mutual trust may develop. This feeling of mutual trust is necessary for further accurate communication. According to Jourard, 3, 1964, “we disclose our-selves when we are pretty sure that the person receiving the disclosure will evaluate our disclosures and react to them as we do ourselves.”’ Withholding one’s feelings and attitudes from others often results in one not knowing what his real feelings are himself. Alienation from oneself and from others is so wide-spread in our culture that Jourard feels no one really recognizes it as a sickness.
The self-alienated person who cannot know himself because he cannot communicate himself authentically to another person often finds himself vaguely anxious and depressed. Since he does not know himself he cannot grasp his problem clearly, and he cannot know the contribution of his own feelings and perceptions to the problem situation. It is even difficult for the self-alienated person to identify a situation as a problem. The dangers that most people anticipate from authentic communication of themselves to another person are often real. A person who discloses himself to people with whom he has only a casual relationship may be regarded by them as weak, confused, or sick. They may take advantage of the information given and do harm to the self-discloser. An individual needs to communicate himself authentically to only two or three significant others whom be loves and trusts.
If an individual communicates himself honestly to two /or three (or even one) loved and trusted others, he will likely be better able to play his professional role without great conflict. But when an individual does not reveal himself to anyone, and thus has only an ambiguous and confused concept of himself, he may develop conflicts between the roles he is asked to play as a professional husband or father, and his confused concept of what he himself really is. Conflict of this type often results in anxiety, neurotic symptoms, psychosomatic ailments, and death. Honest verbal communication is especially necessary when the two persons in a relationship have experienced different environments, have developed different interests, and more important, have experienced different ranges of stimuli.
For example, if one person’s attitude toward architecture has developed from his limited range of experience with conventional homes and buildings, and the other’s attitude has developed on the basis of a much wider range of architectural stimuli from conventional homes all the way to a considerable degree of experience with architecture designed by highly creative architects, the two are almost certain to have different attitudes toward particular buildings. Only through honest communication to each other about their attitudes toward buildings and about their particular concrete experience with architecture can they come to understand and perhaps accept the other’s different attitudes. The same process holds when the two have experienced different ranges of social stimuli. One person may dislike behavior in people which the second person can only understand by coming to understand, with the help of the first person, the concrete experiences that determined his attitude. It is much easier for two people to communicate accurately and concretely their attitudes toward experiences outside their own relationship.
Yet when one individual feels that the other has a mistaken perception of him, he may with the other to express his exact feelings and attitudes toward him. Negative as well as positive feelings must be expressed to the other if honest communication is to take place. But it is quite possible that honest communication of dislikes for the other will tend to destroy the relationship. However, no relationship can develop without some negative feeling; some anger and frustration. These feelings should be expressed to the other at times rather than suppressed or expressed to an outsider. If the relationship is more rewarding than punishing for both, it will survive and gain from honest communication of negative feelings. But a self-conscious striving to communicate accurately and in great concrete detail all of one’s experiences to the other has a false ring, especially when it becomes somewhat intellectualized or labored.
An individual may also strive to be honest to the other but later discover that he has deceived himself and the other. He may wish to perceive himself and have others perceive him as an honest person, but will fail so long as he strives, so long as he attempts to reveal himself in his unique essence in a single moment, and so long as he holds a rigid picture of himself as a person who is honest. But a person who has never communicated to another honestly may have to go through this stage, and hopefully will come to realize that relatedness and the experience of identity in a relationship cannot be achieved by self-conscious striving, cannot be simply verbal, or achieved in a short period of time. Another result of a. self-conscious striving to be honest to achieve this longed-for relatedness to another is what Tom Banta calls “selective authenticity” Banta,4, 1965.
The individual wants to be honest but covers up other feelings and attitudes which he may wish to keep Secret or which are unconscious. He may avoid telling the other of his deepest disturbing fears, desires;and terrors. If he is able to communicate these disturbing feelings, this may threaten the other, especially if the other also has disturbing anxieties and fears. When both disturbed persons attempt to communicate disturbing fears to each other, feelings may become increasingly threatening, complex, tangled, ambivalent, and morbid. The two individuals may then attempt to escape each other. Each must learn to communicate to the other only the feelings that the other can handle, can come to understand, accept, and react effectively to, and each must learn to understand, accept, and make an effective response to the other’s communicating or disturbing feelings. In time, each may come to understand the complexity of the other’s feelings and move out of the fear-producing tangled web of interacting disturbing emotions. Thus far we have considered communication as an aid to increased accuracy of perception of the other. There is some evidence from experimental studies in interpersonal relations that accuracy of interpersonal perception is related to social effectiveness and interpersonal competence (for example, the review by Steiner,5, 1955 and a study by Farber, 5, 1962.
Communication, both verbal and nonverbal where there is no conflict between the two, is also rewarding in itself. It is both a complete surrender, an outpouring of oneself to the other, and an active process of giving to the other whatever is necessary for his or her momentary experiencing or development. Communication moves each individual away from a feeling of isolation, tends to satisfy his or her need for affection, and in part frees both to be less dependent upon each other, to be self-sufficient, and to face the world alone. At the same time it provides the contact that is necessary for the feeling of relatedness and “What I am,” or identity.
Condition 2: Complexity of Social Perception
The human nervous system seems to be built to simplify and organize the multitude of concrete stimuli which impinges upon it. We need to order concrete stimuli, the thousands of sensory perceptions we receive from another person, into a manageable system. We simplify the enormous complexity of social stimuli. We have to. But we can easily overdo it, for when we overly simplify another’s behavior, we lose something of the other. Whether we consciously realize it or not, we usually compare one person to another or to several others we have known. Is Nancy more or less affectionate than Joan? Or is John more or less creative than Jim? The simplifying processes that we use to experience others are determined by two kinds of past experiences: (1) the traits our culture has told us to look for and evaluate in
people, and (2) the range of personal experience we have had with people.
A given act of another person is ordered in relation to other acts of that person or in relation to acts of other people we have known. We arrive at perceptions of a “greater-than or less-than” type of organization. For example, Jim is more intelligent than Tom, but Ralph is more intelligent than Jim. We order the behavior of other persons along scales of discrimination, which are our mechanisms for simplifying the otherwise impossible confusion of concrete sensory stimuli? Intelligent-unintelligent, sincere-insincere, and honest-dishonest are examples of scales for ordering people. The term number of categories is used to describe the number of descriminations we are capable of making along any given scale. If we perceive others as being either intelligent or not intelligent, we are making use of only two categories; but if we perceive Tom as slightly unintelligent, Jim as slightly intelligent, Joe as moderately intelligent, and Ralph as highly intelligent, we are making use of four desirable categories along the scale of intelligent-unintelligent. To achieve simplicity of perceptual organization, the individual uses a very small number of scales to discriminate between the acts of people and uses a very small number of categories along each of his scales (more dichotomous or black-white).
When this process of simplification reaches an extreme, we are no longer in perceptual or emotional contact with a real live other person; we are experiencing him or her in a world of abstraction. To perceive a person through highly simplified scales and categories means that we ignore much of the person’s concrete behavior. We are not “with” the other person. At the sensory level, which is the most concrete level of human perceiving, people order muscular tensions, the sound of another’s voice, or a visual image of another, along scales such as weight, loudness, and so forth. But when we impose an abstract ordering scale such as sincere-insincere upon these many concrete sensory stimuli coming from another person, we are shutting out much of the concrete stimuli and registering only the stimuli that fits into our system of scales, categories, and needs. When we summarize a number of concrete acts of another person by perceiving him as submissive, a great deal of information is lost in the abstracting process. But when we perceive—as a summary of another’s behavior—that “He will do what his girl friends want him to do, except when he is jealous of a girl, and he will do what his teachers want him to do, except when the teacher has given him a bad grade,” less sensory information is lost. It is likely that the human organism’s discrimination system is hierarchically organized, with concrete sensory scales such as weight and loudness at the bottom, and the most global. integrating. scales like sincere-insincere or intelligent-unintelligent at the top.
When the master scales at the top become very powerful and suppress sensory scale experiencing so that communication within the hierarchy breaks down, the individual will tend to lose perceptual contact with people. Abstract master scales like happy-sad or honest-dishonest nearly always form embedding contexts. The concrete stimuli that has been abstracted into the summarizing scale is embedded in that scale. If we perceive John as stupid, all the concrete behavior of his which we have summarized under the abstract scale of stupid is embedded in the stupid context. Even the behavior of John which is not so stupid is suppressed by the perception, by way of the abstract scale, that he is stupid. But if the abstracting process is regarded as tentative, hypothetical, and subject to change, a given concrete stimulus can be more easily differentiated from the embedding context. For example, some of John’s behavior can be experienced as intelligent.
So, certain stimuli can be removed from one embedding context and placed in another or experienced more fully without the influence of the context if abstract scales are not regarded as “given” as “the way things are,” and as “reality.” The ability to fully experience the concrete behavior of the other with a childlike innocent eye instead of overly classifying the behavior or comparing it to that of another is highly important for experiencing a feeling of relatedness to another. When we overly abstract and experience the other in highly simplified ways, we separate ourselves from the other, as the so-called objective scientist in nineteenth-century thought is supposed to separate himself from the object of his study. The separation of subject from object, the separation of mind, spirit, or intelligence on the one hand from the physiological, the animal or the unconscious on the other, the dualistic way of ordering, has been much a part of Western experience.
Simplicity-complexity of social ordering is an important conceptual framework for understanding interpersonal relationships. If one overly simplifies the other’s behavior in his perception of him, he becomes separate from the other. Since he actually desires closeness and love, he experiences a feeling of failure to achieve that which he thought he was potentially capable of achieving. Separation from the other is then experienced as guilt for having failed to achieve relatedness. In this sense separateness is also experienced as sin. The more complex ordering person is better able to reward the other because he is likely to have experienced a broader range of concrete stimuli. When this wider, richer experience is communicated to the other, it may expand the other’s range of experience. If the other desires to expand his range of experience and is willing to accept change in his perceptual ordering and belief systems, this is experienced as rewarding.
Acceptance of change might be considered as another condition which is necessary for exeriencing relatedness. The more complex ordering person is better able to reward the other because he likely has greater accuracy of interpersonal perception. He understands the other better because he lives less in the separate world of abstract categories. Understanding is experienced by the other as rewarding.
Condition 3: Self-Sufficiency—Absence of High Affection Drive
The human being, from birth onward, seems to have a need to experience love from another person in the form of close physical contact, succulence, approval, understanding, and unconditional love. In giving the child unconditional love, the parent loves him regardless of what he does, and loves him as a person rather than as an object to satisfy the parent’s own needs. In conditional love the parent loves the child only when he behaves the way the parent wants him to behave. The notion that an adult who was not adequately loved as a child and was frustrated by his parents will not have the ability to experience and give heterosexual love is too simple. Many other personality characteristics of the adult and many interpersonal experiences after childhood interact to determine his ability to love. Some individuals may get over the adverse effects of interpersonal failure in childhood; others may not. If the child has a strong attachment to his parents who both loved and frustrated him, and if he has not freed himself from parental attachment, he will not likely be able to fully experience heterosexual love. In the same way, the person who has not freed himself from a previous adult heterosexual attachment, which involved love and frustration with a high degree of conflict, will not be able to fully experience love again.
The individual who has a long history, starting with early childhood, of failure to give and experience love will likely develop a severe need for love. This is the individual who experienices severe affection deprivation and severe feelings of failure. A great deal of the deprived individual’s behavior, some of which may be unconscious, is directed toward avoiding the unpleasant experience of high affection deprivation and with defending himself against additional failure. The individual becomes goal-directed, and the goal-directed organism is blind to much of his environment. If he must perform simple tasks based on habits he has overlearned, he may perform them better than the less deprived person, but complex tasks will be performed less well.
The deprived person experiences severe frustration and anxiety. Anxious individuals often seek a tensionless state to reduce their anxiety. A complex and unpredictable social environment is thus highly threatening to the anxious person. To make his social environment less threatening, the anxious person tends to overly simplify the behavior of others in his perception of them. He tends toward severe simplification of his perception of himself and others, uses a very small number of abstract scales with a small number of categories (black-white discrimination), and distorts his perception of others in accord with his needs. In this way he loses perceptual and emotional contact with others, and his world becomes even more uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Since the achievement of rewarding interpersonal relations is necessary if the severely deprived person is to move toward a relief from severe affection deprivation, the severely deprived individual will perform this interpersonal relations task less well because it is a complex task. Thus the person who needs unconditional love most of all is unable to receive it or give it. And - since he desires perfection in love relationships because of his great need for love but never gets it, his frustration and affection deprivation experiencing increases. He will also tend to fail in love relationships and in marriage because he regards other people as objects to satisfy his great need for love, approval, and understanding. He will project this image upon them and will restrict the other’s freedom to promote his own security much more than the less deprived person. Many individuals in our culture have been severely deprived of affection and have a long history of interpersonal failure. Since they tend to be in a state of anxiety and frustration, they are often unable to lose themselves in a momentary experience of relatedness to another. They are continually seeking either to avoid further failure in interpersonal relationships by withdrawing from social interaction or are seeking to find the perfect relationship which will totally satisfy their anxiety-ridden needs for love.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. William N. Evans, “Two Kinds of Romantic Love,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XXII, 1953. 75-85; Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper, Creative Marriage ,New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961;
S. I. Hayakawa, “Popular Songs vs. the Facts of Life,” in Mass Culture, eds. B. Roscnbcrg and D. M. White, Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957.
2. Robert Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion, New York: Rinehart & Company, 1952.
3. Sidney M. Jourard, The Transparent Self, New York: . Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1964).
4. Thomas J. Banta, Authenticity, Social Games, and Social Contracts. Talk given to the American College Public Relations Association, April 26, 1965, Denver, Colorado.
5. Ivan D. Steiner, “Interpersonal Behavior as Influenced by Accuracy of Social Perception,” Psychological Review XXII (1955), 268-74; Bernard Farber, “Elements of Competence in Interpersonal Relations: A Factor Analysis,” Sociometry, 1962, 30-47.
6. Bernard Pyron, “Intercorrelations of Simplicity-Complexity of Social Ordering, Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception, Acceptance of Change, and Self-Reliance,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1965, 1293-1304.
7. Bernard Pyron, “Accuracy of Interpersonal Perception As a Function of Consistency of Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1965, 111-117.
8. James Bieri, Cognitive Complexity and Predictive Behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1955, 263-268.
