ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author details a number of diagnostic interviews, analysed from a psychodynamic perspective. He interrupts the narrative in order to introduce a comment or two of his own in analysis of the interview. The purpose of the clinical illustration is to closely follow the cognitive and emotional movements of the relationship between patient and therapist, thereby enabling us to demonstrate a number of things. First, the patient’s anxieties and defences during the course of the interview, and second, the patient’s suitability for psychological help; that is, for brief psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The fact that a patient shows certain indicators that might suggest their suitability for a certain type of psychotherapy should be confirmed throughout the subsequent course of treatment, in order for our suppositions for the purposes of diagnosis and indication to continue to hold validity.
