Tell Me, How Is It That I Poisoned Your Soup?

Your psychiatric patient won’t eat the soup in the hospital because they swear you’ve poisoned it. How would you convince them it isn’t poisoned — and that they must eat? 

Here Edgar Levenson asks what constitutes an effective psychoanalytic treatment. For him, some approach analysis from a God-like position, telling patients about their own delusions. But a successful approach concentrates on how external factors trigger very real distortions and fantasy processes, including the actual physician/patient interaction. In this way, an interpersonal analyst would begin not from an authorial position but by genuinely asking, “What was it that *I* did to poison that soup?” (...more info at 1st Link...)