ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the psychoanalytic interview carried out prior to undertaking psychoanalytic treatment. Its objective is to decide whether the person who consults psychoanalyst should undertake psychoanalytic treatment, which depends on the indications and contraindications. A basic rule of the interview, which largely conditions its technique, is to facilitate the interviewee's free expression of his mental processes, which is never achieved with a formal framework of questions and answers. The chapter discusses the objectives of the interview, its framework and setting, and field where the interaction leading to these aims develops. The setting of the interview demands that the variables of time and place be fixed as constants and that certain rules are stipulated to delimit the roles of interviewer and interviewee with regard to the task to be fulfilled. Most authors maintain that the interview technique is singular and proper to itself, and different from that of the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic session.