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Panel Discussion: “The Psychoanalyst and the Training of Psychiatrists”
Contributing Editor: Albert H. Schrut, M.D.
The panel discussed the psychoanalyst in his relationship to the university and psychiatric training. Dr. Norman A. Levy, panel coordinator, outlined the changes in the past 20 years to the now prevalent use of psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) psychiatry. There is an emphasis on individual intensive therapy and practice with middle and upper-class people, resulting in inadequate emphasis on academic and research careers and on mental health problems of the large mass of citizens in the community, despite the contributions of the psychoanalyst to the community at large. Recent efforts to change this situation have included application and modification of psychoanalytic therapy and techniques to encompass the needs of a greater variety and number of patients, the tremendous increase in demand for mental health services, forms of crisis and pharmacological therapy, and etiological considerations beyond the intrapsychic and interpersonal, including the socio-cultural and the biological.
Dr. Robert J. Stoller expressed concern over disenchantment by students and psychiatric residents, as by the public, with psychoanalytic treatment. The resident does not find enough
need to be curious about the psychodynamics of human behavior. He applies a mechanical “hit-or-miss, supportive, suggestive, magic-employing, if-you-love-them-they-get-well kind” of psychotherapy. Dr. Stoller emphasizes that first-year residents must have a chance to get to know and identify with an analyst who can really teach them the value of psychoanalytic knowledge. He suggests that the psychoanalytic institutes would do better in the intellectual atmosphere of the university rather than in the medical schools or in the private practice atmosphere wherein they usually grow.
Dr. Judd Marmor defined psychoanalysis in the terms which Ernest Jones used: “Psychoanalysis is simply the study of mental