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Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan

Posted by Sigismund on August 26, 2008, at 1:26:40

In reply to Re: Sigismund - Harry Stack Sullivan » Quintal, posted by Sigismund on August 25, 2008, at 19:20:14

From somewhere or other............

>Harry Stack Sullivan:
The Psychiatric Interview

It would be a quite serious error to presume that the communication [in the psychiatric interview] is primarily verbal. The sound-accompaniments suggest what is to be made of the verbal propositions stated. ... Part of the skill in interviewing comes from a sort of quiet observation all along: "Does this sentence, this statement, have an unquestionable meaning? Is there any certainty as to what this person means?" ... The client's attitude is not in itself to be taken very seriously; many very resistant people prove to be remarkably communicative as soon as they discover that the interrogator makes some sense and that he is not simply distributing praise, blame, and so on...

I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions. ... A patient tells me the obvious and I wonder that he means, and ask further questions. But after the first half-hour or so, he begins to see that there is a reasonable uncertainty as to what he meant, and that statements which seem obvious to him may be remarkably uncommunicative to the other person.

They may be far worse than uncommunicative, for they may permit the inexperienced interviewer to assume that he knows something that is not the case. Only belatedly does he discover that he has been galloping off on a little path of private fantasy which clearly could not be what the patient was talking about, because now the patient is talking about something so obviously irrelevant to it.

In the psychiatric interview, it is a very good idea to know as much as possible about the patient. It is very much easier to do therapy if the patient has caught on to the fact that you are interested in understanding something of what he thinks ails him, and also what sort of person his more admiring friends regard him to be, and so on.

- Harry Stack Sullivan

Quotes picked up from Harry Stack Sullivan: 'Basic Concepts in the Psychiatric Interview' in The Essential Psychotherapies (ed. Daniel Goleman & Kathleen Riordan Speeth), 1982

 

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