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This volume does not make any particular distinctions between counselling and psychotherapy preferring instead to collapse these activities along with other forms of ‘helping profession’ like social work. This is presumably deliberate for in thereby widening the book's appeal the authors are able to argue for the importance of supervision in a wide range of helping modalities and contexts. Hawkins and Shohet quite rightly point out the relative dearth of supervisory texts available and therefore this book may be viewed as an attempt to design a package that fulfills an identifiable niche in the market. The book is well timed for both counselling and psychotherapy, through the respective organs of the BAC and UKSCP, are struggling with the sort of internal housekeeping and public image issues which preoccupy professions that have yet to obtain secure recognition and autonomy. Part of this struggle, at an internal level, involves developing principles of practice on which recognition criteria, like accreditation, can be successfully grafted. One such principle is supervision, increasingly seen as crucial to practice by counsellors as well as psychotherapists. (In terms of the general availability of supervision it has to be said that, at least as far as the provinces and many NHS contexts are concerned, it is a case of stimulating needy appetite without providing the food. However, that is another matter.)
Interestingly, the frontispiece quote is quis custodiet ipsos custodes? translated as ‘who will care and protect the carers?’ Another less humanistic, more literal interpretation has been ‘who guards the guards?’, which perhaps emphasises the gatekeeping function of supervision concerned with professional interests and standards. Certainly supervision of a managerial and agency-based variety, where issues of accountability are complex, places this gatekeeping function at least on a par with a purely personal/professional development model. However, all supervision