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This interview took place in February 1999 during a supervision weekend held at Donald Meltzer's house at Simsbury near Oxford.1
MBO: Do you think that supervision is a super vision, or a very special vision of the patient?
DM: Well, as you know, in the earlier days of psychoanalysis the supervision was called ‘control’, which was a terrible term - for the supervisor to be controlling the analyst; even at the beginning students didn't like being controlled. It is super in the sense that the supervisor is supposed to have more experience than either the junior or the student; in the supervision almost all the supervisor has to offer is really the proof of his experience, because we are not operating a science in the sense of anything that can be mathematized or quantified. We are working with the quality of things, particularly the quality of emotion and, of course, we all have experiences of life. In many ways, because of their experiences of life, older people are expected to be wiser than young people - which they generally are. Older analysts certainly have had experience of many more clinical situations and therefore are expected to have, and do have, richer powers of discriminating between one analytic situation and another; and this they contribute, or should contribute. It is very much in the spirit of psychoanalysis that this is meant to be a feeding situation - and not force-feeding, but a feeding situation in which what you have to offer is laid before the student or the supervisee for him to select what suits him. I think it must be left really to the richness and the power of your ideas about the clinical material to make it palatable to the person who is being supervised, and you must try to avoid any kind of imposition of your ideas.