Learning about Emotions in Illness: Integrating Psychotherapeutic Teaching Into Medical Education, edited by Peter Shoenberg and Jessica Yakely,  Routledge, Taylor and Francis, London, 2014,  156 pp., $103.07.

The need for medical students to understand the impact of emotion in illness was the impetus for the experiences on which the current book is based. The recognition that students as well as patients are distressed when faced with serious illness and dying needed to be explored. The editors provide a description of two approaches in medical education to teach medical students the role of emotion in illness, both as it effects the patient and the student. They describe two psychotherapeutically oriented experiences for students starting their clinical work: one is to see a patient weekly for one year in weekly psychodynamic psychotherapy sessions with weekly small group supervisory sessions by medically trained psychotherapists (the University College London [UCL] Student Psychotherapy Scheme), and the other to participate in a weekly discussion seminar (Student Balint Group), similar to what Michael Balint did at the Tavistock Clinic, with a small group of other students to talk about the experience of being with patients with a Balint-trained, medical seminar leader and a general practitioner.

The commitment is to a patient-centered approach with a focus on the role emotions play in the doctor-patient relationship, fostering its development or impeding it. The feeling is that only with live patients over time does a genuine emotional relationship develop. Central