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In reading Psychoanalytic Supervision, I felt myself in dialogue with a master clinician sharing the accumulated wisdom of years of supervisory practice. Nancy McWilliams has a gift for writing accessibly about complex subjects and as a result her previous books about psychoanalytic diagnosis, theory, and technique have been well-received and widely read. I have no doubt the same will prove true for this book.
The author covers a broad range of topics, and the detailed table of contents makes the book easy to return to for reference. McWilliams introduces her subject by providing an overview of models of supervision and their historical evolution. The rest of the book is both a systematic and engaging account of her own approach to supervising.
McWilliams describes her experience supervising beginning trainees, psychoanalytic candidates, and licensed professionals; including her work in both individual and group settings. Addressing herself directly to beginning supervisees, she advises them about how to get the most out of supervision, demonstrating warmth and support in her approach. She balances this with a kind of “tough love” in the section “When the Problem is You” (p. 200). Discussing her experience supervising in psychoanalytic institutes, she highlights the challenges of that setting. She points out that what one says to a supervisee can reach the ears of one's analysands, and notes that “the more overlap the institute has in roles and relationships, the harder the job of the supervisor” (p. 152). McWilliams is not the first to comment on the problems created for supervisors by the incestuousness of institute culture (Berman, 2004) but the observation bears repeating.
A particular strength of the book is McWilliams' integration of her previous work on psychic development and character structure (McWilliams, 2011) with her supervisory approach. She does this in three ways.
First, she teaches her supervisees about milestones of psychological development, and help