At first sight the teaching or research interview might seem to sacrifice the most powerful motive upon which the interviewing procedure has relied, namely, that of securing relief from disturbing symptoms. The individual who is suffering from some crude pathological disturbance, like a functional gastro-intestinal disorder, psychological impotence, obsessive ideas and compulsions, comes to the interviewer as a weak person seeking aid of a stronger. If he has been shuttled from one internist to another perhaps receiving derisive looks and contemptuous preachments, the objective interest with which the psychotherapist treats his symptoms produces a keen conscious and unconscious gratification. Even the symptoms are beloved parts of the self, and like the ugly ducklings, they are sometimes treated with special affection (Ferenczi). The hope of being relieved of the annoying symptoms, which is consciously present in many pathological cases, is supported on the unconscious level by an old infantile attitude which expects the interviewer to work miracles. Even some of the antisocial impulses of the personality may welcome the therapeutic situation. These antisocial tendencies are themselves not entirely gratified in the symptoms, for the nature of a symptom is a compromise between these antisocial tendencies and the socialized impulses of the self. Nunberg has pointed out that the unsocialized portions of the personality may support the misguided hope that the outcome of therapy will be the boundless and unlimited gratification of their demands. There is also evidence of the existence of a compulsion to confess (Reik) to antisocial tendencies, which are rejected by the socialized self, and thus to gratify an unconscious need of punishment. Now the sense of being sick and the desire to get well are not entirely absent from any normal person. No one is entirely free from remnants of his adjustive problems, and no one is entirely satisfied with himself. At the beginning of the interview, this motive may appear in consciousness as nothing more substantial than the innocuous belief that any increase in self-knowledge will enable one to deal even more satisfactorily with personal problems as they arise.