A Critical Digest of the Literature on Psychoanalytic Supervision

FROM THE VERY beginning of psychoanalysis to the present there has been a strong tendency for both the student and the teacher of psychoanalysis to rely heavily upon the apprentice system of teaching. In the beginning this was quite informal. Recently considerable formalization of the process has occurred, but for many the core of training remains the supervised conduct of a number of psychoanalyses or fragments thereof. Almost from the beginning of organized teaching, supervision has been accorded an important place in the training program, and with the recent and current efforts to evaluate teaching methods the supervisory process has merited and received increasing attention as reflected by the greater frequency of published work on the subject. This paper is an attempt to cover this work, as well as a few papers on psychiatric supervision. The subject of supervision of psychotherapy is represented by a substantial literature in psychiatric and psychological publications and a very large number of titles in the publications of social workers. For a thorough study of the subject these titles should be included, but they are beyond the scope of the present work.

Although this is a study and digest of published work, it would be cumbersome and repetitious to review contributions successively. Instead they have been grouped under eight headings. Reference will usually be made to specific papers either when the author has taken a position different from the general body of the literature, or when he has neatly epitomized it. The topics to be discussed are: (1) the purpose and function of supervision; (2) the