Summary
A verbatim transcript from the sound track of a videotaped psychiatric interview is reported and analyzed. Taking the phrase YOU KNOW as an identifiable form of verbal behavior, its use and meaning are explored. Interpretations of its symbolic significance, when obsessively used, are offered on the basis of clinical information and inferences from the interview and other records, as well as on quantitative objective data from the interview alone. Generally ignored as a meaningless, merely annoying speech habit of relating, it is proposed that under some circumstances YOU KNOW is a metaphor of profound significance. In the case of this prisoner who was sentenced to San Quentin prison for assault with intent to commit murder, it is suggested that when the prisoner used the metaphor in cluster, it revealed his unconscious need to confess something that he didn't know and didn't know he didn't know.
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From the Department of Psychiatry, University of California-San Francisco Medieal Center, this paper was submitted to theQuarterly, in January 1967. Now at Dept.. of Psychiatry, Scott and White Clinic, Temple, Texas, 76501.
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Wilmer, H.A. Murder, you know. Psych Quar 43, 414–447 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01564259
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01564259