ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how attention to the syntax of the patient’s presenting complaint can be a useful guide to assessing the prognosis for analytic therapy, especially for the new therapist. Four syntactic categories are defined: I do something that I don’t want to do; I am something that I don’t want to be; I have a condition that I don’t want to have; someone has done something to me. These categories represent decreasing levels of “ownership” of a problem and correlate roughly with increasingly poor prognoses. Clinical examples are provided.
