Comments and Criticisms

Dr. Aron replies:

I APPRECIATE DR. ZUCKER'S ATTENTION to my article as well as his efforts to clarify any misunderstandings regarding his position on the methodology of psychoanalytic inquiry. My thanks as well to the editors of Contemporary Psychoanalysis for permitting me to respond to Dr. Zucker's letter. It is precisely because Dr. Zucker has made significant contributions to explicating the principles of interpersonal interviewing that I used the illustration drawn from his book and highlighted his approach to psychoanalytic inquiry.

Dr. Zucker, however, indicates that I see him as encouraging therapists to ask "any and all" of a series of questions, including some questions that he believes do not fit his recommendations and would therefore elicit a character of data different from that which would be produced by his own methodology.

In my article, I did not suggest that "any and all" questions would be recommended by Dr. Zucker, but rather that he might ask "any and all of the following questions " (emphasis added, p. 302). The following questions consisted of a series of seven questions. "Are you this way in other situations? When did you first notice this sort of thing? What other things were you thinking about? What was being talked about? Who did the 'we' refer to? Who was actually there? What did you actually say?" (p. 302). Each of these questions, in my view, was directed specifically at getting the kind of data that Dr. Zucker is interested in, namely, at "fleshing out the concrete details of the report" and acquiring the "particulars concerning where, when, and what" (p. 42). The questions were designed to fulfill Dr. Zucker's stated goals, namely that "Events need to be recreated in such a way that it is almost possible to visualize the scene and hear the actors" (p. 42).

Now, of course, Dr. Zucker and I might disagree about whether or not a particular question or phrasing would be likely to raise the level of abstraction of patient reports