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This book has been hailed as the first comprehensive Jungian approach to supervision to be published, exploring key aspects of the supervisory process and breaking new ground in developing a body of theory on supervision. It has in fact emerged from a series of twelve-week supervision events called Thinking About Supervision developed and organized in the late 1990s by the editors on behalf of the Society of Analytical Psychology. It joins a plethora of recent books on supervision, which indicate a growing interest in supervision as a practice that is taught and theorized about and that has led to textbooks written for trainees and practitioners. Interestingly this book's title almost replicates the title of a book on supervision by the American psychoanalyst Robert Langs, Doing Supervision and Being Supervised , which concentrated on the ‘secure frame’ and is mentioned by one of the contributors. This ‘coincidence’ may indicate that writing about supervision is topical, yet that it is not easy to be original.
Supervision has been practised in the analytic profession since Freud gave Jung advice on his first analytical case in 1909 without calling it supervision, while discovering countertransference in the process. Reading this book makes one realize that there is no such thing as ‘Jungian supervision’ per se, only supervision practised by Jungian analysts who have taken on board ideas and concepts from Freud, Klein, Bion, and even from counsellors and from social workers like Janet Mattinson (1975), who borrowed the term ‘reflection process in supervision’ from the American analyst H.F Searles (1955). This concept is, together with that of ‘learning from experience’, the only theory specifically designed for analytic supervision, though it has since become firmly a part of analytic language.
The claim in the book's subtitle is in fact a question. Is supervision really in search of a theory, is it an activity separate from analysis or rather, as the last chapter ‘Evo