Responsive Supervision of the Psychiatric Resident and Clinical Psychology Intern

The joy of common work between student and supervisor, the excitement of discovery, the struggle with doubt, self-depreciation and despair, the opening up of new horizons, the aesthetic experience of fresh perspectives both given and received make the reciprocal teaching learning process one of depth and sharing among those most cherished in human experience (1, p. 363).

Clinicians who accept the challenging responsibility of supervising a less experienced psychotherapist must inevitably find some satisfactory resolution of the methodological and attitudinal issues unique to that interaction. The present paper was designed to review and selectively integrate the previous literature into a general point of view about supervision that has had both intuitive and empirical appeal in the authors’ own supervisory experiences (on both sides of the desk). While it is recognized that administrative demands and other external limitations enter into supervisory decisions, the focus of the present paper is primarily on the supervisor-therapist relationship.

The supervisory situation begins to take shape from the time the therapist is assigned a patient and a supervisor. The therapist enters into the supervisory contract, among other reasons, hoping to “increase his therapeutic armamentarium” (2, p. 300) and because the supervision is a mandatory component of the training. The supervisor's motivations are less clear. Chessick (3, p. 278) suggested that the “primary gain” of supervising stems from the supervisor's devotion to others’ growth while other “secondary gains” include “the relief of professional loneliness for the psychotherapist who is isolated in an office, a chance to discuss his ideas and expose himself to the criticism of intelligent residents, an opportunity to rethink his basic assumptions and to review the literature, the maintenance of a teaching appointment which has competitive value, and whatever narcissistic gratification is involved in being a member of a fa