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This book should be read and carefully considered by all those engaged in teaching psychiatry. Dr. Hendrick's experience, gained from many years of teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Harvard Teaching Unit of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, is clearly and interestingly summarized.
There should be no argument with: “We seek to provide maximal opportunities for each student to learn from intensive work with a few patients that psychiatry is first of all concerned with what the patient feels and thinks and talks about, not what the dynamic psychiatrist or psychoanalyst supposedly talks and thinks about.”
Dr. Hendrick very appropriately is concerned about the increasing tendency to downgrade the importance of teaching basic clinical psychiatry, in favor of “indoctrinating [trainees] in the high-power promotion and techniques of ‘mental health’ for the many. To do so is to emphasize the superficial application to much wider social objectives of what we already know, or hope we know, before residents have assimilated their fundamental training.” He feels that the beginner should first learn how to “tackle honestly the difficult fact-seeking problems with each patient before he applies what he knows on a mass-production scale.”
He points out that the beginning psychiatric resident has had relatively little preparation for assuming early in his career responsibility for treating the severely ill hospitalized psychiatric patient. Any program which ignores the fact that deep and unexpressed reactions of the patient are decisive for understanding the true meaning of a home visit, weekend privileges, etc., is in danger of producing a cleavage between knowledge of psychodynamics and its application to the treatment of a patient.
There will be little disagreement with the observation that “not only is psychotherapy offered the resident as an essential part of his work with patients, it is demanded by the resident; it is usually regarded by him as his most impor