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It is common knowledge that supervision is a form of practice that is typically undertaken in the absence of a thought-through approach, let alone formal training. Moreover, a large percentage of supervisors begin and continue their work without so much as a cursory reading of the literature. While a few concepts may have passed into the general vocabulary (“parallel process,” for instance), supervisors are most often without any conceptual framework that may both guide the work and offer a reflective vantage point. As a result, most of us are left with a model based only on our own personal experiences of being supervised. In the absence of alternative models that include the insights of more recent developments in theory and practice, our dated experience is generally replicated through identifications. It is most fortunate that we now have a book that addresses the gaps in a manner that is simultaneously scholarly and practical. The Supervisory Relationship: A Contemporary Psychodynamic Approach, by Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea and Joan Sarnat, extends the intellectual vigor and clinical relevance of our multiple ways of knowing to the supervisory process in a manner that is accessible, thought-provoking, and immediately useful.
The opening review of previous work about supervision is both excellent for its comprehensiveness and original in its placement of the supervisory process within developments in the broader sociologies of power and knowledge that saturate psychoanalytic history. The authors' identification of issues of authority as a central feature of the supervisory process reflects their overarching interest in explicating the assumptions and values that are embedded in all supervisory styles of