Sources for asking the right questions?

December 3, 2015 6:09 PM

I am writing an essay about asking the right questions in a therapeutic context (from the patient's perspective), and am looking for interdisciplinary sources for quotes and ideas other than my own to develop my thinking. The goal of the essay is to identify some common blocks to seeing oneself clearly and offer the reader solutions. Examples of useful sources are within.

On the brief end of the spectrum, I am planning to use Robert Greene's quote: "When our emotions are engaged, we often have trouble seeing things as they really are." On the long end, books such as Norman Dixon's On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.

posted by Atrahasis to Writing & Language (1 answer total)

You might like Jerome Groopman's book How Doctors Think. It's about the ways in which medical education trains doctors to go down certain lines of inquiry and logic to arrive at a diagnosis and treatment plan, but that same approach sometimes causes physicians to miss or overlook things that don't "fit" resulting in significant errors. His point throughout the book is that doctors have to ask the correct questions, really listen to their patients' answers, and continue to probe when they get data that doesn't match their preconceptions.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 9:49 PM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]