ABSTRACT
First impressions can be powerful—and are often inaccurate. Perhaps the person has a certain body build, skin or hair color, and manner of speaking or dressing, or is much older or younger than you are. Stereotypical reactions to these personal qualities may evoke certain thoughts, feelings, and fantasies in you that may or probably don’t have much to do with who the person actually is. Patients’ strengths may easily get overlooked. Negative reactions to patients based on limited or inaccurate information can seriously compromise or undermine the therapy. One way to oppose the tendency to prematurely conclude is to keep in a time framework the information gathered about the patient. An example is provided where a time framework enables the therapist to grasp the significance of certain important events in the patient’s life—realizations, connections, and unconscious motivations that otherwise would have been missed. Maintaining a time framework also facilitates the construction of a psychodynamic formulation.
