Interpersonal Reciprocity and Transaction 219the subsequent mediation of overt action by evoked covert
exprience. In our opinion, this is only part of the story. Covert
responses are intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to sub-
jective experience. It is clear that the nature of such covert
responses—that is, feelings, action tendencies, interpreta-
tions, and fantasies—are not evoked completely in the mo-
ment due to interpersonal behavior of another, but rather arise
in part from enduring organizational tendencies of the indi-
vidual, as the following example illustrates.
Parataxic Integration of Interpersonal Situations
The covert impact messages evoked within a contemporane-
ous interpersonal transaction cycle are primarily associated
with the overt behaviors of the interactants. It is assumed that
interactants are generally aware of such covert experience, as
the development of the self-report Impact Message Inventory
(Kiesler & Schmidt, 1993) suggests. However, Sullivan
(1953a) also suggested that other integrating tendencies—
beyond those that are encoded within the proximal interper-
sonal field—often influence the interpersonal situation. Such
parataxic distortionsmay play a more or less significant role
in the covert experience of one or the other person in an
interpersonal situation.
Clinical Example
A psychotherapy patient treated by the first author entered her
therapy session genuinely distraught and depressed. She
reported that a person she labeled “an important friend” had
ignored her during a recent social gathering and failed to
attend a small celebration of her birthday. This was certainly
no surprise to me, as this fellow had consistently behaved in
an unreliable and invalidating manner toward my patient.
However, it again appeared to be a surprise to her, and her
disappointment was profound. The immediate interpersonal
situation with this patient was quite familiar, and I decided
our alliance was now sufficiently established to allow for an
empathic effort to confront her continued unrealistic expecta-
tions of this fellow and to further examine how her attach-
ment to him seemed to leave her vulnerable to ongoing
disappointments.
I responded by saying, “I can understand that what has
happened over the weekend has left you hurt, but I wonder
why it is that despite repeated similar experiences with this
‘friend,’ you continue to remain attached to him and hope he
will give you what you want? It seems to leave you very
vulnerable.” My patient responded with sullen withdrawal,
curtly remarking, “Now you’re yelling at me just like my
mother always does!”
I am fairly certain that had the session been videotaped,
there would be no increase in the decibel level of my voice
during the intervention. And, an internal scan of my reaction
to her report suggested helpful intent rather than countertrans-
ferential punitiveness. Nonetheless, my patient’s response
clearly communicated that I was now berating her and putting
her down, and that therapy was not supposed to go this way.
This continued for several months—any effort I made to
examine my patient’s contributions to her difficulties was
rebuffed in a similar way. This continued to shape my thera-
peutic responses, leaving me hesitant to venture in this direc-
tion when my patient reported interpersonal difficulties. In
other words, the repertoire of therapeutic behaviors I could
provide became more and more limited by my patient’s rather
rigid behaviors in our relationship. In Kiesler’s (1988)
terminology, I was “hooked.”
Several things are apparent from this example. First, using
interpersonal structural models to describe the contempo-
raneous therapeutic transaction, we would see that the rela-
tionship was often characterized by noncomplementary
responses and by a movement away from an integrated ther-
apeutic relationship. I would try to direct her attention toward
herself in an empathic way, and in response my patient would
withdraw and threaten to leave. Second, my patient’s re-
sponse of sullen withdrawal was, however, quite complemen-
taryto her subjective experience of me as blaming and
punishing. And third, the dynamic interaction between the
overt and the covert aspects of our therapeutic transactions
continuously exerted field-regulatory influence that allowed
the therapy to continue. Too much “yelling and blaming” on
my part would lead to a quick termination. My patient did not
seem particularly aware of her bids to get me to back off, in-
stead insisting she wanted my help with her depression and
interpersonal difficulties.
In our opinion, this example highlights the challenges
ahead for fully developing an integrative interpersonal theory
of personality. In bridging the interpersonal and the intrapsy-
chic, there are several limitations to contemporaneous analy-
sis, three of which we discuss further in the next section.Some Comments on Interpersonal ComplementarityThe Locus of InfluenceSafran (1992) is correct in pointing out that interpersonal the-
ory’s bridge between the overt and the covert requires further
development. It is possible that many interpersonal situations
generate undistorted, proximal field-regulatory influences—
that is, covert experience generally is consistent with overt
experience and impact messages reflect reasonably accurate