Sound-film recording of psychoanalytic therapy: a therapist’s experiences and reactions

Abstract

For many years, it has seemed to me that sound-film recording equipment offers unique opportunities for teaching, self-evaluation and research, and particularly for an objective evaluation of the process in psychoanalytic therapy. These potential uses were first called to my attention in 1933, when Mr. Earl F. Zinn, with whom I then began a personal psychoanalysis, was making dictaphone recordings of psychoanalytic sessions with a schizophrenic patient at Worcester (Massachusetts) State Hospital. The data so gathered was transcribed, and at the termination of the patient’s analysis, the transcript had become of formidable size. When I had an opportunity to read parts of it, a few years later, it interested me, especially because I had known the patient. But the potentialities of the original sound recordings in the teaching of interviewing and psychotherapy impressed me most forcibly, and subsequently, in fact, Mr. Zinn demonstrated those possibilities.