Depth-psychological understanding : the methodologic grounding of clinical interpretations / Philip F.D. Rubovits-Seitz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rubovits-Seitz, Philip F. D., 1921-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic Interpretation.

Psychoanalytic Therapy--methods.

Medical Subjects:

Psychoanalytic Interpretation.

Psychoanalytic Therapy--methods.

Physical Description:

xv, 464 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Hillsdale, NJ : Analytic Press, 1998.

Summary:

Clinicians tend to think of interpretation mainly as a type of therapeutic intervention, the communication of depth-psychological information to patients based on methods of inferring latent mental contents. But the interpretive process, Philip Rubovits-Seitz informs us, is first and foremost a form of inquiry, an attempt to gain depth-psychological understanding in which the therapist's job is primarily to learn, not to teach. Depth-Psychological Understanding deals with the unsolved problems, limitations, and scientifically tenuous status of clinical interpretation. Rubovits-Seitz shows interpretive inquiry to be an exceedingly complex and incompletely understood process -- a process that involves conscious, preconscious, and presumably unconscious mental operations along with numerous components and overlapping stages.

Although clinical interpretation originated with Freud, the latter's positivist preference for purely observational methods made him ambivalent toward interpretive methods. According to Rubovits-Seitz, the legacy of Freud's positivism still pervades clinical thinking and interferes with progress in investigating and improving interpretive methods. He reviews the paradigm shift in general science from positivism to postpositivism by way of demonstrating the compatibility of interpretive inquiry with a postpositivist approach. Post-Freudian models of clinical interpretation are evaluated, and clinical methods of interpretation are compared with interpretive approaches in nonclinical fields. The work concludes with a consideration of common but avoidable errors in clinical interpretation along with remedial strategies for dealing with them.

FollowingDepth-Psychological Understanding; clinicians may no longer take for granted the interpretive process and the accuracy of their own interpretations. Rubovits-Seitz's scholarly survey marks a major advance in comprehending the methodology of clinical interpretation and in setting forth both the problems and promise of interpretive methods.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-430) and indexes.

ISBN:

0881632791

OCLC:

38528426