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… Describing his ‘Conversational model’, Hobson contrasts getting to know a person with knowing about him. The diagnostic and treatment processes do not follow one another but take place simultaneously and start with what is going on in the ‘now’ of the interview. That is the meat of the process and the essence of it is the exploration of the problem through experience in the here and now. Hobson invites us to compare his description of his work in his book with video tapes of himself at work. Audio and visual tapes of interviews form a central part of Hobson's teaching of the ‘Conversational model’. He stresses the need for these tools of self-observation in order that the therapist can learn the details of what he is communicating to the patient with words, tones, postures, and gestures. To anyone who has seen these tapes, as I have, it is clear how closely what he does coincides with what he advocates in this book. The enormously sensitive attention to minute detail of his own and the patient's verbal and non-verbal communications is remarkable and lies at the heart of the method. In the language of Buber, he refers to the ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ meeting in the moment of the interview.…
… The ensuing, almost unendurably painful work forced Hobson to acknowledge hidden areas within himself despite his own long analysis and to discover what he found to be the essential loneliness at the heart of psychotherapy. He considers that, if he had known then what he does now about destructive splitting mechanisms, the outcome might have been different.
(From JAP, 32, 1, January 1987)