ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy practice within the National Health Service presents few more exacting clinical tasks than to conduct a psychoanalytic consultation interview. Consider how the meeting between two people, initially strangers to one another, is convened. Sometimes the therapist who encounters a person for the first time is forewarned and forearmed by a referral letter penned by a time-starved family doctor. There is a fuzzy boundary between assessment consultations and the kinds of session that take place in brief or even longer term psychoanalytic psychotherapy. To be sure, there are a number of contrasts that could be highlighted, not least because the therapeutic engagement between an assessing psychotherapist and a patient is brief in nature. It is easy enough to catalogue some of the principal aims of conducting a psychodynamic assessment interview. It is less easy to accomplish them. Many kinds of fact are relevant for understanding a person's life situation.
