Techniques developed for teaching more empathic affect recognition and reflection to medical students during their introduction to psychiatric interviewing begin with a concrete grounding in facial muscular movements and facial affect recognition, and proceed to the use of countertransferential affective experience to aid in ascertaining personality types. Observations about the temper of today's medical students by psychoanalysts may be of help in avoiding increasing their already substantial characterological resistance to affective learning and empathy that has recently been reported in the medical education literature.