The article considers the value of observational field studies in the teaching of psychotherapy so that candidates-in-training can apply their classroom knowledge to the actual treatment process. Modern analytic training programs use the fieldwork externships to provide students with an opportunity to study the severely regressed patients who demonstrate the most primitive defenses and resistances and thus induce intense countertransference reactions. Emotional learning occurs—the student accomplishes the ability to recognize these resistances and tolerate their own impulses and defenses. The important psychoanalytic concepts which the fieldwork student learns are tension states and the discharge of impulses, contact function, emotional contagion, inductions, and the resistances to inductions.