ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an interview approach, the life-space interview, originated by Fritz Redl under specific conditions of practice with ego-disturbed children and contrasts it with traditional interview techniques found in clinical social work practice. The original psychoanalytic model from which this is borrowed is best suited, and was originally developed clinically, for the classical adult neurotic. Beginning in this way, the life-space approach was further experimented with at Pioneer House, a residential treatment home for boys, at the children's ward and residence at National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda at the University of Michigan Fresh Air Camp, a summer camp for disturbed boys from which setting the clinical material is drawn. The chapter examines the ways in which the behavioral episodes may be used by the clinician as potential content for life-space interviewing, and levels of function that have been tentatively worked out for this style of interview.
