Intra-staff openness; “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

At the 1986 Chestnut Lodge Symposium, Diane LaVia read a presentation written by a group of five female members of the Chestnut Lodge medical staff, reporting on our study group, which had been meeting for the prior three years. The membership included Drs. Lea Goldberg, Diane LaVia, Laurice McAfee, Vega Zagier, and myself. Like many of the symposium presentations, it was not published. The presentation conveyed the importance of staff members learning aspects of each other’s histories. I believe that the notion of the “blank screen” has been perversely used to maintain our own schizoid defenses: “It’s nobody’s business but my analyst’s” serves to keep us as strangers from the others with whom we may work side by side for years or decades. If we only learn about our colleagues at their funerals, we are left with the poignancy of lost opportunity. This opportunity probably has clinical implications as well as interpersonal, as patients observe our interactions with our peers. With their heightened acuity regarding trustworthiness, they take the measure of our own defensiveness, our own hyper-reliance on a professional veneer.