[The psychiatrist and stress, or the psychiatrist's stress...]

Today's popular image of the psychiatrist is often that of a specialist capable of analysing, with a sort of bewildering power, all of his patients's reactions and psychological problems. The patient's capacity to unfold appears to increase almost as a result of the psychiatrist's control over his own emotions. The author, who is here referring to Epinal's image of the infallible psychiatrist, believes that the psychiatrist, in moments of privacy can observe the effects of his own emotional stress and how they often relate to his unresolved neurotic problems. It is in his practice, nevertheless, that the psychiatrist can privilege and give meaning to his own emotional stress in order to gain deeper insight in his mode of relating to his patient. Such additional awarness should then permit a more careful and satisfying analysis of what is experienced in a two person or group relationship. The acknowledgment of physical state resulting from emotional stress precedes an insight which always corresponds to a signifier leading to a signified which is then to be decoded.