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All five contributors to this engaging book have staffed the pioneering WPF Counselling and Psychotherapy Training in Supervision. The authors offer a good range of theoretical underpinnings, and vivid examples from their wealth of experience, in a way which illuminates theory and practice. The book is built on a broad and informed pluralistic analytic framework. Three of the authors are experienced analytical psychologists, and the other two are psychotherapy members of the FPC. Five of the chapters are separately authored by the two editors, four by Gertrud Mander, two by John Stewart, and one by Mary Banks, and the contributions are set out in four sections, with a degree of healthy overlap. The first three sections deal with the supervisory relationship in its various contexts, and ways of understanding and implementing the requirements of a formal training. The fourth and final section, headed ‘Generic Issues’, deals with ethics, supervision of supervision, and endings.
At the outset, Christine Driver lays out the orientation and content of the book in the form of a contract, which she compares to the commencement of therapy or supervision. She engages with her readers as an adult to adult level in a way which also encourages thought, reflection and stock-taking in relation to the reader's own position and what might be wanted or hoped for from the book. In due course the other authors convey the way in which they each both respect and value adult level of exchange in the supervisory relationship, while attuning to the ubiquitous range of underlying dyadic, oedipal, sibling and peer dynamics.
Edward Martin begins the first section by exploring and elaborating ways of listening to the absent patient. He also transcends the tramlines of current conventions by inviting us to reconsider the value of the original model followed by the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society (as well as in Britain until ). In this, trainees were analysed and supervised by the same person. He