Course director(s): Giovanni Stanghellini (Florence, Italy), Bill Fulford (Coventry, United Kingdom) 08.30 - 12.00, Hilton - Salon Orff

The aims of this Course canbe summed up as follows: (1) improve the epistemological awareness of mental health professionals concerning the crucial situation of the interview (2) provide methodological guidelines for clinicians while performing the interview (3) provide criteria for clinicians and researchers to test the results of their interviews. We will first shortly revise the basic tenets of the mainstream tradition, i.e. the "technical" approach to psychiatric interview, and then pass to scrutinize the large repertoire of problematic issues concerning the situation of the psychiatric interview in general, and the procedures of structured interviews in particular. The second part of the Course will be devoted to the problems arising in assessing first-personal experiences (with a special focus on schizophrenic and pre-schizophrenic persons). Very little effort has been made until now to bring to the foreground the problem which arise in examining the psychiatric patients' subjectivity. The following are crucial questions: "Can subjectivity be made accessible for direct theoretical examination? Does each examination necessarily imply an objectivation and consequently a falsification? Which degree of falsification is acceptable?". The last part of the Course will address the issue of alternative (with respect to standard techniques) approaches to the psychiatric interview as a way to illuminate the quality of subjective experiences and behaviours, their meanings, and the pattern in which they are situated as parts of a significant whole. I will sketch a concurrent, phenomenologically-oriented epistemological framework for the psychiatric interview, and provide evaluative criteria.