Response by Ives Hendrick

It has been my pleasure (not always the privilege of an author) to enjoy these reviews of my recent monograph on psychiatry education today and to benefit. In part this is due to the discussants' clear summaries of my meaning, as well as their own criticisms. The direct quotations they select are particularly gratifying, for these do add up to an excellent index of my strongest motivations for writing this book. These interests are enhanced by the four variations of professional experience the reviewers and this author each represent.

Stephen Abrahamson brings us the catalyzing effect of a scholar who studies medical education as a whole. His observation that training in all clinical specialties, as well as ours, could benefit from a “more graduated introduction” is of special interest. But the difference should not be overlooked between minimal hours and years of preparation of the psychiatrist for his specialty and the years of medical training for the other clinical specialties. I am not entirely clear how well Dr. Abrahamson recognizes psychiatric teaching aims not only at intellectual knowledge and professional growth, as he reminds us, but especially at a sensitiveness to the patient's feelings. The full development of this sensitivity, regardless of talent, always requires long, intensive experience. His pessimism that the training years can be shortened much today (except by more training prior to residency) is well grounded.

All discussants sense the weighting of my convictions by my experience in long-past decades and my age; Dr. Enelow even suspects “the past seems more attractive than the present.” In some ways yes—definitely. Yet I devoutly trust this is not entirely a disadvantage, due chiefly to early fossilization, or else to a frozen philosophical viewpoint of bygone decades, but that it also contributes a perspective on what could be improved today. Dr. Enelow speaks of my attitude as the “Meyerian tradition”; that may be true if he means good histor