ABSTRACT
In day-to-day work, one draws on principal conscious skills, knowledge, and intuition. But the situation in which you need to be consciously in touch with a whole range of ideas and concepts is the diagnostic interview. Here I would stress diagnostic in conjunction with assessment for analytic psychotherapy; we have to be getting at some sort of diagnostic picture, in order to think about the patient coherently and, if necessary, to be able to discuss him with colleagues to whom we may be referring. This picture has to include, of course, what the patient is not.
