A Deterrent in the Study and Practice of Medicine

In approaching their patients, the medical students and practitioners of our series had inhibitions, symptoms, and symptomatic acts directly related to their choice of profession. In general they were not able to maintain an optimal, flexible distance from their patients, being too close to some, too distant from others, and fluctuating from one extreme to the other with the same patient.

At closer range the causal factor of the deterrent noted in all was that their typical patient was the projected mother, and the typical therapy was the ablation of the breast with which they were identified. The underlying aim was an attempt to complete the cathexis of their own ego—amounting to a cure of their ego defect, to 'find' and 'choose' it as Tausk (19) put it, or 'bind' it as Simmel (18) expressed it—as their narcissistic object and masculine ideal.1 More precisely, the involvement of these patients with this task contained the raw material for the deterrent. It is possible, of course, for the healthy male, as