Abstract

This chapter: reviews the basic tenets of mainstream psychiatric interviewing techniques; analyzes the different ways of conceptualizing symptoms in the biomedical, psychodynamic, and phenomenological-hermeneutical paradigms; describes the family of dispositives in use during the interview, that is the first-, second-, and third-person mode of interviewing; introduces three levels of the psychopathological inquiry: descriptive psychopathology, systematically studying conscious experiences, ordering and classifying them, and creating valid and reliable terminology; clinical psychopathology, pragmatically bridging relevant symptoms to diagnostic categories; structural psychopathology, assuming that the manifold of phenomena of a given mental disorder are a meaningful whole; and provides a phenomenologically- and hermeneutically-informed flowchart for the psychiatric interview.