In the last paragraph of his paper ‘A defect in training’, Yorke (1988) has a sentence which serves as an excellent link to the opening of this paper – “For all their importance, empathy and awareness of patients' anxieties do not in themselves amount to psychological understanding”. In his paper, he had made a plea for more psychoanalytical psychology to be included in a general postgraduate psychiatric training, and I am in complete agreement with his cogently-argued case.