You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Both psychoanalysis and teaching are among the impossible professions, so teaching psychoanalysis is a doubly impossible venture. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that few analysts have even tried to write about how to do it. Yet, because it is so difficult, there must be a strong demand for guidance on how to do it. Given the reluctance of analysts to expose our uncertainties and inabilities, this unfulfilled demand is understandable. Now the demand can be satisfied. Not only do these authors give us such a book, they give us a thoughtful, useful, provocative, and readable one. For me this comes not a moment too soon.
The Supervisory Encounter is a smart book. It lays out the problem of supervision in a systematic way, illustrating principles with vignettes drawn from supervision of residents in psychiatric training, beginning psychotherapists, and advanced candidates at analytic institutes. All of the authors are male. They identify themselves on the cover as M.D.s. Yet the voice in the book is that of a female supervisor not identified as to primary professional orientation, and the model supervisee is male. Is this a politically correct choice? No matter, it reads felicitously.
These caveats notwithstanding, I learned some things of clinical significance from this book and got a new slant on some problems I had