UNDERGRADUATE PSYCHIATRIC EDUCATION AS REFLECTED IN FINAL EXAMINATIONS
CHARLES WATKINS M.D., and
EDWARD KNIGHT M.D.1
1 Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, Louisiana State University, School of Medicine, New Orleans, La.
Only general suppositions can emerge from a survey of this sort with regard to content of the examinations. These are: There is a definite trend in the direction of teaching human behavior as a basic science. It seems to be implemented by the use of clinical material rather than basic psychological, cultural and neurophysiological data. Human behavior as a basic science is often approached by simply teaching the standardized conventional psychoanalytic theory of personality development, without adequately relating this approach to cultural and biological factors.
There is some hint of a peculiar dilemma facing psychiatric educators. Clinical psychoanalytic material was used to outline basic science phenomena. In clinical handling of patients these same principles could not be directly applied with ease, thus the handling of patients was by the usual pragmatic psychiatric methods. It is probable that this occurs because intensive psychotherapy is not usually possible during medical training. Therefore basic psychoanalytic science was not really integrated with clinical practice even though clinical analytic material was used in first two years.
