Health Coaching for Medical Doctors–Bringing Owls to Athens?

Health coaching for medical doctors may be “bringing owls to Athens”. Since they are, of course, themselves experts on health. However, everyday professional life shows that they only partially follow their own professional advice on maintaining a work-life balance. This raises the question whether the bio psychosocial well-being of physicians can be promoted when the interaction of the conscious and unconscious dispositions and motives of their health-related behaviour is analysed in a psychodynamic counselling relationship. This qualitative case study is therefore carried out in a junctim between counselling and research. The objective is to psychoanalyze dysfunctional action and behaviour in exemplary individual cases, thereby achieving an improvement. For this purpose a concept for psychodynamic health coaching was developed and applied to individual cases. The results are used for a hypothesis on the motives of medical doctors’ behaviour which jeopardizes their health.