Becoming Psychiatrists: The Professional Transformation of Self

Psychiatrists make a deep impression on patients and their relatives. This book will provide insight on how psychiatrists are trained and witness their struggles toward professional identity. Uniting information on the training program at University Psychiatric Center, the author examines what kinds of people to become psychiatrists, how their training experience alters their sense of illness, treatment, and responsibility, how they cope with suicidal patients, and how they overcome the uncertainties of their work. Underlying these lessons is the organization of the program, the moral transformation it puts residents through, and the tendencies toward omnipotence it embodies.

The larger and ever-changing context of this study is psychiatry itself. The profession constantly vacillates between the psychological and physiological explanations of mental problems, but in no country have the psychoanalytic schools of Freud and his successors influenced the profession so deeply and broadly as in the United States.

However, today the leading edge of psychiatry is shifting toward biology and physiology with a seriousness and depth that are neither cosmetic nor ephemeral. This orientation is still combined with basic training in the psychoanalytic model of mental disorders and their treatment, but there are basic differences between the two groups in how they go about their work, in the model of pathology they use, and in the values they hold. This being the case, incompatibility may force psychoanalysis to the periphery.

The new biopsychiatry constitutes a basic shift in how psychiatrists are trained and go about their work. This study describes how leading psychiatrists were trained, before the new mandarins ascended.