The Psychiatric Interview

This is a wonderful book that every psychologist should read. All of the topics that Sullivan discusses still apply to psychology today. This book gave me a great deal of insight about how to approach the interview and my patients. It was recommended to me by one of my mentors and I am glad he did.

Harry Stack Sullivan's work deserves to be read widely, and is an extremely important antidote to the pharmaceutical-crazy approaches to mental health that are so dominant in the modern world. This book can teach the reader a great deal about how to deal with the dynamics of a therapeutic interview--and more importantly how to understand conversations in general! This approach to understanding communication fits well with Bateson's excellent analyses of the power-dynamics of conversations, and with Laing's and Minuchin's analyses of what happens in familial communications. I think this book should be a MUST-READ before any M.D. or therapist enters the interview room. Along with offering important practical guidance, it can help alert you-as-therapist to ways in which your own issues are inappropriately undermining the therapeutic exchange.