The goal of psychotherapy is to relieve the patient of distressing neurotic symptoms or discordant personality characteristics which interfere with his satisfactory adaptation to a world of people and events. Sweeping as it sounds, this aim is actually a limited one, as the practicing psychotherapist well recognizes. Psychotherapy-including its most extensive form, psychoanalysis—is repair work.

(11 pp.)

It is therapeutically important not to view the patient as a static nosological entity but as a group of dynamic forces in flux as they advance, shift, and retreat in the interpersonal relationships of a culture. (11 pp.)

Knowledge, theory, experience, and intuition are matters of learning plus talent. Self-awareness is gained only through frequent and honest consideration of our own psychological operations. (11 pp.)

The work of the therapeutic interview takes place under certain time-space conditions. To belabor such a peripheral though obvious fact may appear trivial. Yet these considerations, self-evident to the experienced therapist, present a batch of unwelcome problems to the beginner. (9 pp.)

Before we consider what the participants in therapy say, let us discuss their actual behavior. I will make no attempt to examine in detail the motivations behind these actions, confining my remarks to ways in which they can be efficiently managed. (9 pp.)

Explains with examples how to proceed with the initial interview and beginning of therapy. Particularly considers the rationale and use of interpositions which will continue to be used through the course of therapy. (39 pp.)

For discussion purposes we can designate the middle period of therapy as ranging from the first interpretations on to the very end of therapy. In theory this work will consist of freeing the ego of a symptom-producing neurotic conflict. In practice, the chief technical tools for the task are the therapist’s remarks, which fall into two groups, (a) interpositions and (b) interpretations. Interpretations, more characteristic of the middle period, will now be examined and discussed. (46 pp.)

There are no rules about how long psychotherapy should last. Each case is unique. Cures or improvements may require a few months to several years. Patients with schizophrenias may be in treatment for many years to a lifetime. Finding briefer methods of doing the work is a problem for organized research. The beginning clinician must content himself with managing as correctly as possible the techniques thus far known to be effective. (9 pp.)