The field of medicine is notorious for its “hazing” culture, perhaps best captured in the satirical novel The House of God. Even as the field has enacted certain protections, the empathic qualities that we most want in our own doctors are often the very qualities that training snuffs out. While psychiatric training is no exception, psychoanalytic theory offers an understanding of why and how burnout, depersonalization, and emotional exhaustion come to be. The dual nature of the concept “identification with the aggressor” accounts for both conscious and unconscious mechanisms of hazing culture within the medical system.