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“In my medical training the emphasis was always placed on ‘doing’: to examine, to take blood, to order investigations; the less importance was attached to what the patient himself wanted to tell me. Sure I work as a Doctor, I spend less time doing things and more time listening to my patients. For the majority of patients this is the
most valuable thing I can offer them. I have also learned to enjoy my work more instead of feeling slightly dissatisfied”.
This is a quote from a general practitioner, who was fortunate enough in his medical training to have a patient for psychotherapy supervised in a group. This delightful and important book is a dialogue between the psychiatrists and psychotherapists at University College Hospital, London, and the Psychosomatic Clinic in Heidelberg. Following the Eleventh European Conference on Psychomatic Research in 1976, a European Community Grant enabled the comparison and development, in these two centres, of psychotherapeutic training of medical students. The methods of inducting the students, supervising them, teaching them, containing their own unanalysed personality, and enabling psychological growth, is developed. One soon sees that there is no correct way of organising such training and the dialogue of the various facets of open or closed supervision groups for medical students, or what is seen to be “a suitable patient”, for weekly psychotherapy for a year with medical students, is very thoughtful. During the dialogue, one is privileged to view a debate, which leads one into many fascinating arenas, such as: diagnostic considerations, the importance of psychosomatics in training, the value of the medical student's feelings as well as the patient's, the anxieties in colleagues about such risks as student caring for patients and, most importantly, what should be taught in medical schools.
I will highlight one vital thesis from the many above — the centrality of psychosomatic medicine. Most medical schools in the United Kingd