First Steps in Psychotherapy: Teaching Psychotherapy to Medical Students and General Practitioners

The contributors to this volume, like many others concerned with medical education have for a long whilebeen conscious of the fact that in the training of medical students and in the practice of medicine too little attention is being paid to the psychological aspects of illness and to the use of psychotherapy in patient care. In an attempt to fill this gap medical students at University College Hospital, London, have since 1958 been given the opportunity on a voluntary basis to treat a pa- tient with weekly analytically-orientated psychotherapy under supervision for a year or longer. In 1977 a similar scheme was started at the Psychosomatic Clinic of Heidel- berg University. We were fortunate in obtaining generous financial support from the European Community which has enabled teachers and students from our two uni- versities in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany to collaborate in this student-psychotherapy teaching project and to compare our experiences. In this book we present an account of this joint educational endeavour, including our successes and our failures, as well as our attempts to solve some of the problems we have en- countered. We decided to let individual supervisors and teachers who inevitably differed in their approach write their own contributions rather than try to present a unified pic- ture which would not have given a fair impression of our work and experience. Ifthis has led to some repetition in the text we hope readers will appreciate the reason for it.