The continued evolution of ideas concerning the training and education of a psychiatrist and the development of well-integrated residency training programs on a national scale depend largely on the type of conference held in Ithaca, N. Y., in 1952, and the publication of its transactions. There have been tremendous spurts of growth and shifting emphases in this field in the past decade, very well reflected in this official report and supplemented by the recent formulation issued by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
Almost the only point on which everyone agrees is that the competent psychiatrist must have a basic understanding of the psychodynamics of personality development; how he comes by this understanding is the source of continued controversy. The first work of this conference was to attempt some coordination of viewpoints on the broad concepts of psychodynamic principles, particularly to close the unnecessarily wide gap between the genetic-dynamic