The initial psychotherapy interview: a content analysis of the verbal responses of novice and experienced therapists

This study tested and confirmed the clinical impressions that (a) the novice psychotherapist may focus so much upon the exact words and nonverbal behavior patterns of his client (the process of making "concrete" statements) that he may lose sight of the larger picture that his client may be revealing at any given moment during the interview; (b) the experienced psychotherapist, on the other hand, seems to be responding to the words of the patient at a level of abstraction that attempts to integrate and understand the messages that the patient is trying to convey about himself; and (c) this latter process is reflected in the making of relatively more "abstract" comments than is true of the novice. Ss were 24 first-year psychiatric residents and 19 staff psychologists and psychiatrists at a veterans hospital and a medical school. The learning theory implications of these findings is discussed.