Complementarity between the styles of the patient's material and the interpretation.

Abstract

This paper shows the importance of the characterization of the patterns of interaction between patient and analyst in the psychoanalytic process. These patterns are called "styles" and comprise both the patient's ways of offering his material and the analyst's ways of receiving it, as well as the linguistic characteristics of his interpretations. Different styles in the psychoanalytic dialogue are exposed and correlated with specific ego states, anxieties, and mechanisms of defense. A new stylistic nosography is proposed, correlated with a communicational nosography and the classical psychiatric psychopathological states. A clinical sample of a psychoanalytic session is presented.