ABSTRACT
Interaction between patient and therapist begins long before they come face to face and is conditioned by the way psychiatry and psychotherapy are organized. To understand the process of applying for therapy at a clinic one must understand how clinics are organized and what types of clinic are available to different types of applicants. There are four types of psychiatric clinic: psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic, religio-psychiatric, and hospital. The religio-psychiatric clinics resemble psychotherapeutic clinics with one important difference: ministers do most of the therapy, and affiliation is not with a psychotherapeutic professional association but with associations of pastoral counselors. Since it has little need for complex medical equipment, a psychiatric clinic, unlike most medical facilities, is chiefly an organization of people. The clinic makes an important contribution to the analytic society or the training institute or to the residency program of a hospital by providing training cases, and the training program is a major motivation for the participation of therapists.
