Spring is late on this Schwabing afternoon. Grey hangs over our heads, dull cigarette smoke is scattered across the asphalt as proof that the invitation of the café is being accepted. Dr. Ehrat has placed his coat on the bench opposite him and ordered a cappuccino. "With sweetener," he tells the waitress, looking at her firmly. In the theatre one would say he does this with emphasis. The question to be negotiated over a few hot drinks is: how does someone communicate whose task is communication itself?
Dr. Hans Hermann Ehrat represents idiolectics, the study of a person's own language. It is described by the Society for Idiolectics and Conversational Guidance as being like a fingerprint that a person gives to communication. Now he sits before his cappuccino and we work from the rough toward the fine.
"Basically it is about shaping the encounter between people so that conversations become possible," says Dr. Ehrat. His tone is deliberate, his words simple, but far from arbitrary. "A conversation is never completely impossible." The goal is that communication begins to flow. When communication flows, something happens to people. The most beautiful thing about the method, he says, is when the conversation partner discovers what helps him or her to live.
The method sounds as if it wants to leave certain things aside, especially in existential situations such as on a palliative care unit. "Many things are left aside, but they run along automatically," Ehrat answers. "I can talk about a problem, or I can step beside the problem and talk about it from there," he explains, sketching the basics of the so-called paralogical interview. During the conversation, the subject creates links to himself - as many as possible.
Dr. Ehrat had been working as a family physician in Neuhausen am Rheinfall in Switzerland since the early 1970s when a personal encounter with psychotherapist Adolphe David Jonas opened the world of idiolectics to him. He completed additional training as a psychotherapist and in 1985 co-founded the Society for Idiolectics and Conversational Guidance in Würzburg. Across the German-speaking world he taught idiolectic conversation in medical practice as an author, seminar leader, supervisor, teaching therapist and lecturer. These insights are increasingly used in palliative medicine.
I ask about social relevance. From kindergarten onward, Ehrat says, we are told what we do wrong. Negativity can create power, even abuse of power. Usually he asks simple, concrete, opening questions. This time, however, he is expected to answer a whole catalogue of them. "I think you want to crack me," he says, takes a sip and grins slightly awkwardly. I ask whether he likes sport because I want to know whether he is drawn to systems of right and wrong, victory and defeat.
Again and again Ehrat asks for clarification, wanting to know exactly what I meant or might have meant by a question. This Swiss doctor rarely puts his foot wrong; he checks the ground he is standing on too often for that. When I ask why, he flinches. "That puts me in a corner," he says. In idiolectics, what counts is not what is said but how it is received.
"Idiolectics is not about pink gummy bears," Ehrat says, smiling. It enables encounters and relationships; that is joyful. The footing points of these relationships are key words. Key words are knots of situation and history, anamnesis and character. They can only be key words because they also have something to do with the listener. A good idiolectician therefore first knows himself.
What has he learned about himself? "I have learned how I am," Ehrat says. And how is he? He wonders aloud whether he wants to say. The image emerges of a person who has merged with his vocation.
The Society for Idiolectics describes one aim as follows: the client should be enabled to recognize and use the signals he or she constantly expresses and sends, insofar as this is necessary and useful from the client's own perspective. The client should experience that he or she possesses inner wisdom and good reasons for behavior. This can strengthen trust in one's own resources.
We talk about the possibilities and successes of idiolectics. Ehrat says that idiolectics has difficulty claiming its successes. Then he offers an image: "If you have a big problem, you can go into the problem with people. But you can also stand beside it, in a place where the sun is shining, and look at it from there. The problem is the same, and yet it has a different weight."
I can imagine this abstractly, but in a concrete case I struggle with the image. "Shall I honestly tell you what occurs to me?" he asks. "Please." - "You are too young," he says, laughing. That hits me. A journalist never wants to be called young. Perhaps idiolectics is not a communication strategy that explains how it works, I think, but one that primarily prevents how it does not work.
After ninety minutes and three coffees with sweetener, Dr. Ehrat and I stand outside the café waiting for his taxi. "Now I am really looking forward to the seminar," says the idiolectician. "Can one actually switch off idiolectics?" I ask at the end. "I can't." That can be said.
