ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the nuts and bolts of preliminary interviews. Among Sigmund Freud's papers on analytical technique, "On Beginning the Treatment" mentions his habit of taking on the patient "at first provisionally, for a period of one or two weeks" which he calls "preliminary experiment" or "trial period". Preliminary interviews have a three-fold structure according to their purpose and follow a logical rather than a chronological order: symptomatic function, diagnostic function, and transference function. Regarding general direction of the treatment during preliminary interviews, it is important to distinguish the two clinical types of neurosis. The bedrock of the analyst's strategy in the direction of the treatment will always be transference correlated with diagnosis. The hysteric's other is an other that desires and is marked by lack, thus rendering the hysteric subject powerless to achieve jouissance.
