Personality Growth in Psychiatric Residents

In the three years of residency training, a physician is made into a psychiatrist. It is easy to think of this as a simple process, much like any other education: A group of people who want to learn a body of knowledge and skills are offered opportunities for such learning, and learn. Yet when one spends a few years studying the processes by which residents are selected and trained, the impression grows that a great deal more is involved than just transmission of information and techniques. By means of a more or less planned intervention in a normal process of personality change, rather far-reaching modifications of the physician are made, so that he grows into a new identity. This paper is devoted to some reflections on the less obvious effects of psychiatric training, unsystematically observed in the process of carrying out a long-term research project at the Menninger School of