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This gem of a book overflows with wisdom accumulated over the decades of Nancy McWilliams's experience doing psychodynamic supervision, as well as with crucial insights about psychodynamic treatment itself. The author has a rare combination of brilliance and modesty (including about her own errors), which smooths our way into putting her advice into practice. In contrast, I once had a supervisor who seemed so smug that I was careful to use his sometimes helpful advice only with other patients, not wanting to further inflate his ego. A fellow candidate told me she had a similar supervisor, so she never told him when his overconfident clinical predictions proved wrong.
The book is well organized in nine chapters that cover various aspects of supervision, including group supervision. When she does group supervision, McWilliams often credits young supervisees with knowing more than their older supervisors about relevant group dynamics, as well as about cultural sensitivity. She observes that “many people of color in the United States … are currently finding that the emotional burden of educating white clinicians about racism has become exhausting” (p. 181). Her final chapter offers advice to trainees about getting the most out of supervision.
The preface whets the reader's appetite for what is to come. Like the rest of the book, it is engagingly personal. McWilliams credits mentors who encouraged her highly successful writing career. She speaks of her mother's death when she was nine, and its pivotal influence in leading her to value not only the new, but also the old, rather than fall victim to exclusive neophilia. She is also deeply interested in our professional literature on supervision (and treatment), digesting and citing it at every turn. Avoiding jargon, she focuses on supervision as a means of “promoting maturation, confidence, and a sense of agency in the therapist… . the emphasis on wisdom and clinical experience is more reflective of clinical realities” than i