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Our purpose was to design and implement an elective course in psychodynamic psychiatry, drawing on existing resources and using a psychoanalytic perspective to help synthetize science, the humanities, and clinical practice.
Psychiatry has a long tradition of drawing on the humanities to understand mental functioning and individual experience (Engel 1980; Shlozman 2017). In addition, the importance of developing personal and professional qualities such as empathy has long been recognized in medical education (Quince et al. 2016). Specifically, the arts have been used to promote self-reflection and empathy (Graham et al. 2016; Potash et al. 2014).
Specialty Choice Placements were developed in response to the U.K. General Medical Council's Tomorrow's Doctors (1993), which encouraged medical schools to broaden their range of clinical experience through optional (elective) placements. In 2018, Imperial College London expanded its placements in the penultimate year of its medical degree program, creating the opportunity to offer a new course in psychodynamic psychiatry. This innovation combined clinical learning in psychiatry with an immersion in the arts, using a psychoanalytic approach as an organizing framework. The course aimed to enhance the medical curriculum by