From the Outside In

Abstract

A crucial, but largely neglected aspect of human communication concerns how individuals' experiences within important life relationships influence their inner conceptions or intrapsychic models of interpersonal relationships. In this article, we use a set of data consisting of individuals' reports of the quality of three relationships—their family, left vague as to who should be included in this concept; their relationship with parents; and their relationship with current intimate partner or spouse—to explore two related questions pertaining to one such intrapsychic conception: individuals' inner definition of their family. First, we examine how the people included in this definition of who is “in” one's family varies across stages of family development. Second, we examine this variation against the predictions of two major theories in contemporary psychiatry that attempt to explain how relationship experiences are internalized, thereby empirically evaluating how the “outside gets in.” Although certainly preliminary, the results presented in this article do support the importance of further study of the intrapersonal as well as interpersonal aspects of human communication.