The one-day conference, organized by the Psychotherapy Advisory Sub-Committee of the Joint Committee in Higher Psychiatric Training took place on 8 October 1981 under the chairmanship of Dr H. Wolff, at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

There has been a recent upsurge of ‘educationalism’ in the field of psychiatry which, as a trainee, I would like to comment upon. The Cambridge conference on education and training (Bulletin, June 1982, 6, 105; 107) briefly considered the option of educational objectives as a way of planning, monitoring and assessing a training scheme. Others have called on the College to issue a syllabus for the MRCPsych Examination (Bulletin, November 1981, 5, 215), and Dr R. Symonds of the Southern Division has presented a syllabus for in-service training which is adapted from a Canadian model. All these suggestions suffer from drawbacks, but some are more appropriate to the needs of trainees than others. Each is trying to tackle the same problem: to fill in the educational gaps which all trainees have, some more than others, and which frequently go undetected until the exam. Such elementary skills as mental state examination and interview skills are often poorly taught.

Until recently the teaching of dynamic psychotherapy received little constructive attention. Training was limited, like the therapy itself, to a select few whose motivation propelled them through arduous, expensive courses in the analytic institutes or the few provincial diploma programmes. Most psychiatrists and clinical psychologists qualified without exposure to or formal instruction in the dynamic psychotherapies.

The Approval exercise is an attempt to standardize psychiatric training in different hospitals, following the introduction of the Membership examination ten years ago. Very little, however, has been said about how standards are defined, who defines them, how reliable they are, or how valid in respect of the attributes required to become a consultant psychiatrist. The College is now directing its attention to these issues in considering a syllabus for the examination, a document setting out the aim of training in psychiatry and, of particular importance to this paper, the possibility that the Central Approval Panel should become more accountable to those whose interests it primarily represents—the trainees in the hospitals whose approval status it decides.

The Society was founded at a meeting in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in December 1961. Most of the twenty-one foundation members, who came from all four Scottish university medical school centres, were young men, lecturers or senior registrars for the most part. They elected John Smythies president and Ian Oswald secretary and drew up a constitution which committed the society to meet ‘at least twice a year … in the four Scottish universities in rotation’, other centres also being asked to act as host from time to time. The primary aim of the society was ‘to promote and encourage research into psychiatry and allied disciplines' and it was a multidisciplinary society from the beginning. Two of the foundation members were clinical psychologists and for some years a biochemist, Dr Todrick, was president.