In addition to providing psychiatric care to patients with somatic diseases, liaison psychiatry plays an important role in the teaching of the relational aspects of the clinical encounter between patients and clinicians. This series of three articles proposes a critical reflection on this topic, and presents examples of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programs developed by the psychiatric liaison service at Lausanne University Hospital. In this first article, we discuss the increasing unease we experience with regard to the way clinical communication is trained on the postgraduate level and we make specific suggestions of how to rethink the so-called communication skills training.