You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When an elder statesman of psychiatry speaks, we may wonder if the past seems more attractive to him than the present, but we should all listen. Certainly, Ives Hendrick is an elder statesman of psychiatry and of psychoanalysis. He comes from that pioneering era when American psychiatrists trained in the Meyerian tradition were exposed to psychoanalysis, and excited by its promise of making behavior understandable and treatment possible, enthusiastically integrated their new-found psychoanalytic understanding into their background of careful and systematic investigations of behavior. Now, some forty years after his beginnings in the field, Ives Hendrick, with characteristic modesty and a refreshing absence of pomposity and pontification, gives us the benefit of his thinking about present-day psychiatry education.
In Hendrick's definition of dynamic psychiatry, one sees the shortcomings of the era from which he springs. He refers to the understanding of behavior only in terms of genetic dynamics with no reference to interactional dynamics. He proposes defining psychiatry as a basic science, but then, to my disappointment, defines psychology, physiology, and sociology as adjunctive areas and states that their ideas are “very different from the primary clinical facts of basic psychiatry.”
Nonetheless, Hendrick makes an excellent proposal to which insufficient attention is paid today: that the basis of psychiatric theory is clinical observation and that one might, therefore, do very well to expose medical students to patients right away. His proposal that first-year medical students should do psychiatric interviewing makes good sense.
Hendrick proposes that insufficient attention is being paid to the beginning resident's unpreparedness for clinical and administrative ward responsibility in psychiatry. He raises the question: Must young residents go through the same stages as their senior teachers (analysts trained in the 1920's who came out of the Meyerian tradition) ? Evi