Teaching Psychodynamic Psychotherapy to Medical Students

At the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in December 1998, there was a Presidential Symposium entitled “Psychoanalysis and American Medical Education for the Millennium: Teaching and Practice-Building Opportunities.” The speakers included national leaders in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and medical education. The talks covered the range of relevant topics, from the new economic organization of medical education, to teaching programs and needs, to research and medical education. The following papers are from that symposium. As a group, they describe the landscape of American medical education at the turn of our century. They describe the new need for psychodynamic teaching in a variety of teaching venues. This need offers great opportunity to psychodynamic psychiatry, to psychoanalysis, and to individual practitioners. Psychodynamic science and art can once again make an important contribution to medical education and receive in return a new energy for its own growth and development. Medical schools are becoming a rich, creative, cross-fertilizing, interdisciplinary mix as the basic and human sciences extend their reach and begin to overlap. Cognitive science has discovered affect processing and seeks sophisticated information about human emotional systems. We psychodynamic psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are the experts. These papers describe the multiple opportunities for us in American medical education.