ABSTRACT
University College Hospital, now the Royal Free and University College School of Medicine, has a long tradition of giving clinical medical students the opportunity to see selected patients for weekly individual psychotherapy for periods of about one year. The author was grateful to the Trust for their support and to Peter Shoenberg for his invaluable advice and encouragement with the intention of helping students to understand the psychoanalytic view of the influence of early emotional development on the behaviour of the adult. In the chapter the author describes his experience with these students, who were seen for one hour on each of the four weeks' placement. What the author called his "discovery" was the realization that just giving the students definitions of his psychodynamic ideas was a simple, but futile exercise. These are very intelligent people, well able to absorb and memorize no end of ideas and definitions, which they then recite and comment on.
