ABSTRACT
Psychiatrists tend to conceive of interaction as carrying a heavy freight of personal imagery. Although the actors are also regarded as enacting conventional roles, the psychiatrist is considerably more interested in the “‘interpersonal relations” of the participants than in their enactment of culturally assigned positions. Sociologists generally put more social structure into the interaction: their attention is given to persons as members of social groups and organizations. Psychiatrists touch upon this when they recognize that they themselves act as humanly as does the patient often responding to him or her personally rather than professionally. But the burden of the psychiatric analysis is in teaching the patient an awareness of the operation and effect of his or her personal images. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts understandably overstress these that people act not merely and always as status representatives. At the same time the social psychologist ought to emphasize that interaction is both structured process and interpersonal process.
