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There was a cartoon in The New Yorker several years ago consisting of a series of pictures showing the psychiatrist in his office, and in each picture there is a different patient lying on the couch, talking, and in each picture the psychiatrist is listening silently. In the last picture, the psychiatrist is seated at the dining room table with his wife, the wife appears to be talking, and the psychiatrist says, “Shut up.” If one's spouse's employment consists of sitting at a complaint department desk in a department store, he comes home at night having listened to tales of woe all day and may very possibly feel like saying “shut up” as in The New Yorker joke. If the husband is a surgeon, he has been working with life and death and may feel emotionally drained. What is the difference? Unique to the profession of psychiatry are the degree of the emotional involvement and the drain of the emotional involvement. And the skills, the tools that he employs, are the very same tools which are necessary for a good marriage—the elements of communication.
We have all the problems other families have and some special problems due to the nature of the work. We also have the distinct advantage of the special skills and insights. So let's face the special problems and take advantage of the special skills.
The patient has priority in time and emotion. We do not see our spouses as much as we would like to see them. They do not have as much time to be actively involved with their children as we would like. Other people's demands on the professional person come first.
When the psychiatrist does get home to his family, the very skilled listener is no longer in a mood to listen. He would like to talk for a change. He has been suppressing his feelings all day. He has been suppressing his talking all day. Moreover, the problems of his family seem very trite compared to the problems he has been focusing on. His sensitivity has dulled.
For some of his patients, the psychiatrist is “God”—he rece