The Experience of Supervision

Follow the fox. If we allowed candidates to speak more openly and if we knew how to listen, we would learn much. I have not found a great deal in the literature on the experience of supervision from the supervisee's point of view or on their assessment of it (Martin and coll. 1978). I haven't found anything at all on how the supervisor prepares himself for the initial meeting with the candidate. The desire to be a good supervisor is disturbing to the supervisor just as the desire to be a good analyst makes it difficult to be an analyst.

All authors agree on the need to respect the supervisee, to consider him a younger colleague, to favour, or at least not to hinder the development of his potential, qualities and creativity as well as on the best techniques to be employed in order to achieve such results. There is so much insistence on these aspects as to lead one to conclude that supervisors feel the need to guard continually against the pitfalls created by their own insecurity, by an uncertain narcissism and by the subsequent possible risk of being subtly arrogant and insufficiently respectful in training.

This is never discussed openly. A pleasant-mannered leg-pull is to be found in Levenson (1982) who quotes an aphorism of Oscar Wilde's on fox hunting, ≪a marvellous example of the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible≫. According to Levenson, ≪with a very slight shift, much the same might be said about the process of supervision. It is a marvellous example of the infallible in pursuit of the ineffable!≫

The esoteric aspects of analytical training give room to some unwitting abuse, which accounts for so much insistence on the need for caution.

Like analysis, but in a different way, the first meeting is preceded by imaginings and expectations.

Here, too, initially there will be two scared people in a room, but they will be scared for reasons of a different nature than those of the two people who meet for analysis. It is likely that