Interpersonal Reciprocity and Transaction 217little is accomplished as the pattern of What do you want to
do?—I don’t know, I’ll do whatever you wantcycles and
stalls. In an occupational relationship, both boss and em-
ployee tend to focus on the employee. The boss controls (in a
friendly, neutral, or hostile way) and the employee complies
in kind (i.e., complementarity). In contrast, an employee who
consistently tries to boss the boss (i.e., similarity) will not be
an employee for long!
Points 180º apart describe opposition on each SASB sur-
face. Opposing transitive actions are attack and active love,
blame and affirm, control and emancipate, and protect and
ignore. Opposing intransitive reactions are recoil and reac-
tive love, sulk and disclose, submit and separate, and trust
and wall off. Opposing introjected actions are self-attack and
self-love, self-blame and self-affirm, self-control and self-
emancipate, and self-protect and self-neglect.
The complementary point of an opposite is its antithesis.
Given a particular transitive or intransitive behavior, the an-
tithesis is identified by first locating the behavior’s opposite
on the same surface, and then identifying its complement.
That is, antithetical points differ in interpersonal focus and
are 180º apart. Due to the impact of complementarity (i.e., a
bid or invitation), the antithesis is the response that pulls for
maximal change in an interpersonal relationship. For exam-
ple, a psychotherapy patient treated by the first author would
frequently sulk (2-6) when she experienced the therapist as
not understanding or supporting her (e.g., I don’t know why I
come here, this isn’t helping me). Rather than complement
this with blame (1-6; e.g., If you don’t try to tolerate not get-
ting exactly what you want from me, this won’t work), the
antithetical affirming (1-2) response was enacted, (e.g., I can
see that something I have done or failed to do has left you
feeling pretty upset). The complement of affirm (1-2) is dis-
close (2-2). The patient would often visibly relax and com-
municate her frustration and disappointment. Thus, the
antithesis of sulk (2-6) is affirm (1-2). Other antithetical pairs
are emancipate and submit, active love and recoil, protect and
wall off, control and separate, blame and disclose, attack
and reactive love, and ignore and trust.
Introjection is based on the relations between the transitive
and introject SASB surfaces and describes the circumstance
where an individual treats him- or herself as he or she has
been treated by important others. This reflects Sullivan’s view
that important aspects of an individual’s self-concept are de-
rived from reflected appraisals of others. That is, the person
comes to conceptualize and treat himself in accordance with
the ways important others have related to him or her. Com-
mon patterns often seen in psychotherapy include depressed
patients who recall chronic blame and criticism from parents
and now chronically self-blame, and patients with borderline
personalities who were physically or sexually abused as chil-
dren (perpetrator attack) and who now chronically self-attack
via cutting or burning. As with complementarity, all intro-
jected positions are marked by clusters in the same location
but reflect the pairing of transitive and introject surface de-
scriptors. These include attack and self-attack, blame and
self-blame, control and self-control, protect and self-protect,
active love and self-love, affirm and self-affirm, emancipate
and self-emancipate, and ignore and self-neglect.
It is important to note that reciprocal interpersonal patterns
anchored in either the IPC or SASB are neither inherently
good nor inherently bad; they are value-free. In addition, we
have tried to present them in their simplest form—as descrip-
tors of behavior patterns that can be observed in interpersonal
situations. A taxonomy of reciprocal interpersonal patterns is
fundamental to contemporaneous analysis to account for
transactional influences occurring in the interpersonal field
and to developmental analysis to account for the enduring
patterning of interpersonal situations that characterize a
human life.Contemporaneous Analysis of Human TransactionIn examining the immediate interpersonal situation, we may
now use the taxonomies of interpersonal behavior and recip-
rocal interpersonal patterns to provide a contemporaneous
analysis of human transaction. The most central pattern dis-
cussed previously is that of complementarity, and it is this
reciprocal interpersonal pattern that anchors most theoretical
discussions of interpersonal interaction. If we are to regard
interpersonal behavior as influential or field regulatory, there
must be some basic goals toward which our behaviors are di-
rected. Sullivan (1953b) viewed the personification of the
self to be a dynamism that is built up from the positive re-
flected appraisals of significant others, allowing for relatively
anxiety-free functioning and high levels of felt security and
self-esteem. The self-dynamism tends to be self-perpetuating
due to both our awareness and organization of interpersonal
experience (input), and the field-regulatory influences of in-
terpersonal behavior (output). Sullivan proposed that both
our enacted behaviors and our perceptions of others’ behav-
iors toward us are strongly affected by our self-concept.
When we interact with others, we are attempting to define
and present ourselves and trying to negotiate the kinds of in-
teractions and relationships we seek from others. Sullivan’s
(1953b) theorem of reciprocal emotion and Leary’s (1957)
principle of reciprocal interpersonal relations have led to the
formal view that what we attempt to regulate in the inter-
personal field are the responses of the other. “Interpersonal
behaviors, in a relatively unaware, automatic, and unintended