Psychotherapy for system requirements

System manufacturers which fulfill theirs customer´s real requirements are said to be successful. But how can these real requirements be obtained efficiently? For some decades now, the science of informatics, namely the software engineering branch, produces numerous answers to that question. For reasons beyond the scope of this paper they seldom hit the heart of the matter. This paper will introduce an approach which was transferred from the discipline of psychotherapy to the field of requirements engineering. A set of rules was formed to assist the analysis and quality assurance of customer requirements represented in prose. The paper reviews the foundations of the approach, explains its details with different examples and names the experiences made in various parts of business and technology.