Interpretation of Patient Behavior Through Goals, Feelings, and Context 1

Every response by the therapist requires some way of making sense of the patient’s behavior. With a plethora of conceptual nets, the clinician typically has a bewildering bag of descriptive constructs but no effective working guidelines for making practical sense of what is going on with the patient. The thesis of this paper is that three working guidelines enable the therapist to interpret and make sense of patient behavior: (a) the goal-directed component of the patient’s behavior, (b) the accompanying feelings, and (c) the situational context.