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particular order that is dictated not by timing, but by the social
environment of the individual. Sullivan’s developmental epochs are:
Infancy (birth–one year):
During this epoch, the mother
figure gives the child tenderness and the child learns anxiety.
Childhood (one–five years):
The mother remains the main
interpersonal relationship with the child, but is now
distinguished from other people that care for the child.
Juvenile (six–eight years):
The child begins to need
playmates, or peers of the same status. This is the beginning
of socialization, and a child should learn how to cooperate,
compromise, and compete with other children.
Preadolescence (nine–twelve years):
This is the most
important stage because any mistakes that were made before
this epoch can be corrected, but mistakes made during this
stage become extremely difficult to correct later on in life.
This stage is defined by the child developing a close, or best,
friend. If a child does not learn intimacy in this stage, they
face difficulties with sexual partners later on in life.
Early Adolescence (thirteen–seventeen years):
This epoch
starts with the beginning of puberty. The need for friendship
now exists alongside a need for sexual expression as interest
begins to focus on the opposite sex. During this stage, the lust
dynamism first appears. If a child does not have a capacity
for intimacy already in place, love and lust might be confused
with one another and the individual may have sexual
relationships that feature no real intimacy.
Late Adolescence (eighteen–twenty-three years):
While
this epoch can occur when an individual is as young as
sixteen years old, late adolescence sets in once an individual
has the ability to experience both intimacy and lust toward
one person, and a long-term relationship is the main focus of
the individual. This epoch is also characterized by the
individual learning how to cope with life in the adult world.
Adulthood (twenty-three years and older):
During this
epoch, the individual establishes his or her career, financial
security, and family, and his or her pattern for viewing the
world is stable. If there is success in the earlier epochs,
relationships and socialization become far easier; however, if
success does not occur in previous epochs, interpersonal
conflicts that lead to anxiety will be much more common.
From Harry Stack Sullivan’s extensive work in personality came
interpersonal psychoanalysis, a form of psychoanalysis that focused
on understanding the present psychopathy of an individual by
looking at the interactions of his or her past. While Sullivan’s
theories have become less popular, his influence in psychology
remains.
THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS
OR MINUS TWO
Memory limits
In 1956, cognitive psychologist George A. Miller published his now-
famous paper entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus
Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” In
it, Miller theorized that a person’s short-term memory (STM) can
only hold around seven items, plus or minus two, at any given time.
In order to deal with any information that is larger than seven
items, we must first organize this information into large chunks. For
example, by combining words into sentences, or combining
sentences into stories, we are able to hold more than seven words in
our short-term memory. However, our memory still only has the
ability to hold seven of these chunks at one time. For example, an
individual will have a hard time being able to recall a sequence such
as this because there are more than seven numbers:
4 8 1 9 7 6 2 0 1 3
However, by naturally grouping these numbers into chunks, our
short-term memory will be able to recall these numbers. In the
sequence above, if we group the numbers together (let’s say we
group them as something familiar, like years), we can then make
that sequence of ten numbers into the following sequence:
4 – 8 – 1976 – 2013
Before, we would have struggled to recall ten individual numbers,
but now we only have a string consisting of four chunks, and it is
much easier to remember.
In order to improve the capacity of one’s short-term memory, the
information must be organized into bigger chunks. By taking little
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