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This book is a record of a symposium organized to bring together representatives of the various professional groups (psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social caseworkers) involved in the training of psychotherapists. The meetings were held over a three-day period at the Southeast Louisiana Hospital in February 1959.
Different schools of thought had free expression by experts, and the discussions revealed important problems, many of them impossible of solution at the present time but at least recognized for future investigation.
A recognition of the part played in the development of the human mind by unconscious mental processes which has followed Freud's original work with the technique of psycho-analysis has infiltrated many allied disciplines, such as epidemiology, child guidance, and all forms of psychotherapeutic treatment. The result is that psychotherapists are needed for preventive therapy in epidemiology, for all forms of child guidance, including child analysis, for group work in order to ameliorate neurotic reactions, and also for intensive psycho-analytical treatment and research into psychotic states.
The epilogue to this book states in a clear and perhaps over-simplified form the main problems with which all psychotherapists are faced:
1What is psychotherapy.
2Who should undertake psychotherapy.
3Training of psychotherapists, including psycho-analysts.
I think it is best to take these three problems separately, although they tend to have much in common.