Intensive Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia * : An Initial Interview

Abstract

A brief initial interview with a regressed paranoid schizophrenic woman has been reported. Its contents have been examined with emphasis upon some of the ways in which the patient communicated. Attention has been directed to the demands made upon the therapist-interviewer by the patient's total behaviour. These in the main have been demands for a rigid objectivity and the making of necessary and continuing self-examinations by the interviewer. The self-examinations led to successful empathic contact which has been detailed and explained, as has some of the psychopathology uncovered in the interchanges.