I have a number of close friends who are lawyers. Almost all of them are unhappy with their profession and, although they typically earn more money than I do, most have from time to time expressed some envy of my degree and status. Obviously this is not a statistically relevant sample and all conclusions are highly speculative yet there are a number of significant items that suggest that resentment and envy fuel some of the unconscious animus between Doctors and Lawyers. Further, there is reason to believe that the training and cognitive styles that distinguish Lawyers as opposed to Doctors is a contributor to the bureaucratization of our society, now accelerated by the efforts of the Legislative "reformers". Consider:
A Supervisor once commented to me early in my career, in a conversation detailing why he no longer relied on insurance coverage when setting fees with his patients, that his professional goal was to be "fat, dumb, and happy." His sardonic comment was meant to imply that as a Psychoanalyst, all he wanted was to be left alone to work with his patients. Once insurance coverage and government regulations became part of the treatment, he was no longer in a position to determine the conduct of his practice. Further, third party payment could, and often did, introduce difficult, unanalyzable, confounding paradigms into the treatment. Third parties can be analyzed within Psychoanalysis as long as they are primarily resident in the patient's unconscious; once the third party actually entered into the therapeutic dyad, they became real, rather than fantasied, and their unconscious meaning can never be adequately analyzed. (I will not offer a detailed explanation of this point but can assure you that reality can sometimes be so compelling and/or defensively adaptive as to defy analysis. This is related to Freud's discussion of "secondary gain.")
Doctors enter Medical School out of a scientific academic background. They are primarily interested in reducing complexity to order in as efficacious a manner as possible. Only by distilling the relevant signs and symptoms can a patient be diagnosed and treated. Unnecessary complexity is the enemy of Medicine. (Necessary complexity is the basis for Medicine turning into an Information Science/Technology in the years to come, however.) As Medical Professors are fond of saying, "Never look for a zebra in a herd of horses." In other words, the most obvious diagnosis should always be your starting point. Two other points pertaining to Doctors are salient. First, we learn early on to "first, do no harm." If a treatment is likely to be worse than the disorder or the patient is doing "well enough", making changes in your approach is more likely to lead to problems than improvements, in the absence of a proven new approach. Second, from an early stage of our careers we are put in the position of making life and death decisions. For some Doctors this can lead to the kinds of arrogance that tend to provoke countervailing efforts to attack and devalue the God-like being, yet it also means that Doctors tend to be late to concede our inevitable defeats. After all, ultimately, we always fail; every patient eventually dies, yet we "rage against the dieing of the light" for as long as we can. This is one reason so much of our Medical expenses occur in the last 6 months of life
In contrast, Lawyers typically come out of the soft social sciences. The are trained to believe that every injustice can be solved by adding to our body of rules and regulations (laws) and the basis of a "more perfect unioin" is the laws they promulgate. Combined with an unconscious, and sometimes conscious, resentment of Doctors' higher status, the use of Lilliputian ropes to bind Medicine, in the service of a fantasy that they will finally "fix" a system that is a chaotic mess (despite that most of us are pleased with the care we receive from our Doctors) must have been irresistible.
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