[1][2] Current practitioners stress such features as the detailed description of clinical experience, the mutuality of the interpersonal process, and the not-knowing of the analyst.
[3] Along with other neo-Freudian practitioners of interpersonal psychoanalysis, such as Horney, Fromm, Thompson and Fromm-Reichman, Sullivan repudiated Freudian drive theory.
[4] They, like Sullivan, also shared the interdisciplinary emphasis that was to be an important part of the legacy of interpersonal psychoanalysis, influencing counsellors, clergymen, social workers and more.
[5] Sullivan proposed that patients could keep certain aspects or components of their interpersonal relationships out of their awareness by a psychological behavior described as selective inattention - a term that has to a degree passed into common usage.
[7] Sullivan emphasized that psychotherapists' analyses should focus on patients' relationships and personal interactions in order to obtain knowledge of what he called personifications – one's internalised views of self and others, one's internal schemata.