The author advocates the teaching of basic psychoanalytic concepts as part of all normal medical training in order to close the traditional gap between psychoanalysis and general medicine and thus to infuse a new sense of independence into the latter. By reference to typical 'mixed' cases from everyday practice, it is shown that the model of medicine (predicated on natural science and illness conceptions) and that of classical psychoanalysis can be combined in a comprehensive psychosomatic model, as proposed by Uexküll. Such a diagnostic-therapeutic model would greatly reduce the risk of certain false diagnoses, formulated in ignorance of transference mechanisms and of the theory of conversion and resulting in chronic symptomatology.