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Personal analysis on a five times weekly basis continued for at least three years and regular (weekly) supervision constitute the core of a training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. For many years supervision of therapeutic work has been undertaken by a trained and experienced practitioner other than the psychoanalyst conducting the trainee's personal analysis. This happens at the Tavistock Clinic, at the Scottish Association of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists and the British Association of Psychotherapists. It is a practice which is difficult to follow in those parts of the United Kingdom where there are few trained psychoanalysts and analytic psychotherapists. What is to be done in an area where there is only one accredited psychoanalyst? Does this mean that suitably qualified candidates are to be deprived of a training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy? There is precedence, however, for the simultaneous analysis and supervision of a trainee by the one psychoanalytic practitioner.
The requirement that the analyst conducting a personal (training) analysis should not be the analysand's supervisor followed from a recommendation made originally by the Psychoanalytic Institutes in Berlin and Vienna. This was long ago and the fact that it was a source of controversy has been forgotten. Ferenczi and his Hungarian colleagues, of whom Balint was one, doubted the wisdom of this separation of functions. In their opinion a candidate's counter-reactions (Glover 1955) and his countertransferences (Reich 1951) were more readily accessible to analysis when the one analyst conducted both the personal analysis and the supervision. The difference of opinion on this subject was never officially resolved. The London Institute of Psychoanalysis decided in 1947 that different analysts must undertake the candidate's personal analysis and supervision of his clinical work. Balint (1948) believed that this arbitrary decision was not based on a thorough study of the issue. Despite this ruling