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Fellow colleagues, I wish to express my thanks to those who organized this panel for asking me to serve as moderator. “The Doctor-Patient Relationship is Therapy”: I can think of no more important area to be considered; whether we are interested in research, diagnosis, prognosis, or any other aspect of the psychiatric or psychoanalytic discipline, therapy must always be our final meeting ground. Earlier, I overheard someone state that he had considered the panels he wished to attend and had decided that he was going to the one called, “The Doctor-Patient Relationship in Therapy.” Obviously his unconscious had read into the title what many of us believe is fundamentally true. Each member of this panel has had lengthy experience in the subtlety, the intricacy, the formative qualities and the exquisite sensitiveness of the doctor-patient relationship. We ought to know more and more of what goes on between two human beings engaged in the therapeutic relationship. What is the nature of that relationship? And I hope as we proceed that we will not only learn something of the qualifications of a “good therapist,” but, what is of such great consequence, how he acquires those qualifications.
As a moderator, I am supposed to play a somewhat passive role as to contributions, but a rather active role in directing the participants along paths that seem to be possibly productive. However, being human, I will be impelled to indicate from time to time what I would like to see evolve, what questions I would like to have answered, if possible; also to try as far as I am able to indicate what seem to be some of the common denominators that evolve, and to point out the areas of general agreement and general disagreement.
If I might inject my own point of view at this juncture, it seems to me that what has not been sufficiently stressed so far has been the extent to which the doctor and patient are constantly and inevitably involved. One of the questions we must ask is, what are we able to