The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice

In this extensively revised and expanded new edition of the classic, The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice , the authors continue to address the challenges inherent in clinical interviewing—the complexities of defense mechanisms, conflicts, wishes, and fantasies—as they did in their original 1971 edition while also acknowledging the task of adapting their interview strategies to a new era of psychiatry.
New perspectives on psychopathology often emphasize descriptive phenomenological approaches and encourage psychiatric interviewing that is overly focused on describing symptoms and establishing diagnoses. The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice stresses that the clinician needs to learn about patients, their problems, their illness, and their lives. From this readers will understand the universal presence of personality types and the importance of the personality as a determining factor in the unfolding of the psychiatric interview.
Students learning psychiatry often ask, “But what do I say to the patient?” In 20 new and updated chapters, The Psychiatric Interview answers that question by using clinical vignettes from the authors’ everyday work, what they said in a wide variety of clinical situations and what they felt and thought that led them to say it. Specifically this new edition includes,