[The physician-patient relation through a Balint group].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate by means of a contents analysis a Balint Group (BG) after 7 years in operation, to find which type of patients are most disturbing for the General Practitioner and to analyse the sort of feelings they provoke. DESIGN: A retrospective descriptive study which uses qualitative analysis methodology. SETTING: The BG under analysis was created in the heart of the Catalan Society of Family and Community Medicine in 1984. PATIENTS: 21 sessions were analysed, covering 18 patients. INTERVENTIONS: The variables studied were: the motives for presentation, the sort of patient presenting and the doctor's feeling towards them. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Two types of patients stood out: those with somatization disorders and those with a very poor prognosis. The first (12 out of 18) unsettled the professional and caused him/her to lose grip on his/her role. The GP often trivialised their requests or thought they were pretending. Those sessions analysed where patients had a poor prognosis made clear the high degree of empathy shown by the doctor. Questions were raised as to how to tackle the illness both with the patient and his/her family. Feelings of distress, fear, anguish-exhaustion-impotence and rejection-aggression of the doctor towards particular patients were analysed. CONCLUSIONS: The questioning of the doctor's social role or professional identity by particular patients makes it difficult for him/her to maintain a long-term therapeutic relationship with them. The BG was useful for the participants, because of the group dynamic and also because they found out the possibilities and limitations of their treatment.