How do psychologists read others

Psychologists do not ‘read’ people. They generally have experience of meeting people under relatively controlled conditions, say a consulting room, or a known environment, against which they may detect more clearly the different ways we behave and are thinking; and not many people can say that for any large number of people.

They also have training in various psychological theories, which is a framework for understanding basic responses that people make, according to their state of mind. We also talk to them and tell them how we feel and what we think (if they’re lucky). Even if people do not always ‘tell the whole truth’ what they do say is all additional data for the psychologist, and experience allows them to understand the meaning of our half truths.

Psychologists are not generally ‘Freudian’ as such, although most clinical psychologists have some familiarity with psychodynamic theories, and some are practicing therapists. When Freud first started practicing himself over 100 years ago, he thought if he listened attentively, and his patients ‘let go’ of social censorship, and spoke whatever came into their heads (he asked them to ‘freely associate’), he would be able to detect the traces of the buried (repressed) anxieties that were troubling them; he thought he could then tell them what they were, and release them from their illness. He was disconcerted when they fell in love with him instead (many were young ladies).

He realised after a while that they were ‘projecting’ on to him a love relation that really belonged in their childhood (he deduced that they were unconsciously ‘changing the subject’ to something ‘nice’ (or ‘nasty’) to avoid the real issues). His brilliance was to realize that far from being the end of psychoanalysis, this ‘transference’ relationship was actually giving him access to the very buried memories of childhood he was interested in, and so could help in his project of ‘cure’.

Later he came to understand that the ‘transference’ phenomenon was universal, and that the analyst must guard against his own childhood relationships being transferred onto the patient too. Further - and this is his real originality - he realised that since the psychoanalytic situation produced this mutual resonance on an unconscious level, if he allowed himself to consider whatever came into his own mind while they ‘free associated’, rather than trying hard to ‘work out’ his patients psychology, his thoughts might make unconscious associations of their own that were his own unconscious responses to the patients material. Then, if he understood himself well enough, he would be able to understand what his patients unconscious fantasy was from his own responses to it.

He described the state of mind necessary for the analyst to do this ‘free floating attention’, and because it is a form of ‘letting go’, it is very difficult to achieve and requires more than an academic training. It also requires the analyst is herself well enough ‘analysed’ to make use of her associations on behalf of the patient, and so it is a requirement of qualification that an analyst spends many years undergoing their own analysis.

Perhaps this process of free association (patient) and free floating attention (analyst) is the closest to the idea of ‘reading’ someone that I can think of.