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.
In spite of the daunting isolation of our work, we never go unaccompained into the consulting room.” Henry Smith's words capture succinctly a major feature of psychoanalytic supervision-the identifications and other representations of internal objects that are crucial in the supervisory process, just as they are in the psychoanalytic process. In this issue, Smith, Daniel Jacobs, Lee Jaffe, and Frederic Busch make state-of-the-art contributions to the growing literature on psychoanalytic supervision. All address, explicitly or implicitly, intrapsychic representations of critical and significant interactions within the patient-analyst-supervisor triad. Jaffe opening with Yogi Berra's paradoxical quip “Pair up in threes,” underscores the importance to any couple of the “shadow of the object” as he and his cocontributors link the contemporary with the classical and bring us back full circle to Freud's (1917) early contribution on internalization.
In a 1980 study, Wolkenfeld and I noted three similarities between psychoanalytic treatment and supervision: (1) Both are helping processes; (2) both require involvement of the self; and (3) both rely for their effectiveness on multiple identificatory processes, including the analyst's and supervisor's identifications with their own analysts. Although I do not know that any person has systematically taken up all three of these similarities and their many derivatives, the four papers I am introducing have all addressed, separately or collectively, one or more of these areas.
Smith focuses mainly on multiple identificatory processes; Jacobs focuses on the involvement of the self; and Jaffe focuses on the mutual influences between the dyads and triads of the supervisory process and the institutes in which they are functioning. Busch emphasizes an additional important aspect of self: the feelings involved when analysts participate in research and the review process that necessarily goes with it. The four contributors, ever mindful of