[Current medical practice and psychotherapy]

Every physician has his own way of practising a certain form of psychotherapy which can be positive or negative. Why not help those who ask for a training in psychotherapic relation? Psychoanalysis has taught us that the main point concerning the formation to psychoanalysis consists in the personal experience of transferance and counter-transferance. Therefore, the problem is to know whether something essential can (or cannot) be transmitted from this experience without the practice of a personal psychoanalysis. Michaël Balint has made this hypothesis and has proposed an apprenticeship method intended for the physicians. The conference studies the conditions of the formation in this hypothesis. The author proposes to call it "a professional psychotherapy." The question is, in fact, to give the opportunity to the physician to "cure" himself from the illusion that the numerical-experimental (or "scientific") model is the only operation model of medicine and to restore to him the possibility to improve his practice by the level of psychotherapy of which he is capable after an experience of "limited but considerable" change.