Integrative Psychotherapy With Physicians In the Trenches: Convergence of Cognitive, Existential, and Psychodynamic Processes

In this article, I present insights gleaned from over a decade of working in therapy with physicians in the trenches who practice at general hospitals located in an area afflicted by the community and political violence, and recently, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychotherapy with these physicians requires an integrative psychotherapeutic approach that heeds their changing needs. Espousing cognitive-existential psychodynamics (CEP), a theory-based psychotherapeutic perspective developed for complex cases, I show how cognitive, existential, and psychodynamic processes strongly converge during the treatment of physicians in the trenches. Such convergence is manifested in issues of mental representations (of death, medicine, and the hospital) and choice/meaning.