Teaching Psychological Evaluation to Psychiatric Residents

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Abstract
ACCORDING to Kurt Lewin, "Nothing is so practical as a good theory."1However applicable this truth might be in clinical psychiatry, the message is a difficult one for first-year psychiatric residents to appreciate. Specifically, the new resident is confronted with a marked discontinuity between immediate clinical problems and conceptual frameworks that purport to order complex human behavior. Too often psychiatric education appears to accentuate rather than diminish this schism.2Didactic theory-oriented seminars are apt to remain irrelevant to psychiatric practice for too long. This is an important, though not unfamiliar, learning dilemma.3On the one hand, the resident is typically instructed in theory (usually psychoanalytic). On the other hand, he is immersed in a myriad of clinical data and behavior which does not easily submit to application of his new found theoretical base. There are many ways in which the resident

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