ABSTRACT
The handling of a psychiatric case that proves suitable for psychoanalytic therapy may, as regards interview technique, be reckoned to have two stages: the first is diagnostic, the second therapeutic. A matching process best describes the psychiatrist's work in the diagnostic phase. The task of the psychotherapy of individuals is to overcome the resistance to the memory of those old and painful experiences and to liberate the energy which was being wasted by holding them repressed. The work of anthropologists arid psychoanalysts is alike in this, in that both depend on skill in establishing and maintaining a particular kind of human relation called an interview. The psychoanalyst passes the same patient through the same analytic interview situation very many times and thus the analyst gets a view of changing structure that is functions.
