You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
MOST DIFFICULTIES in supervision, it is widely agreed, arise from difficulties in the therapy being studied. They arise, however, from two distinct sources that are often confused—psychological and metapsychological. That is, from the personalities of a particular supervisor and therapist studying the treatment of a particular patient; and from the demarcated boundaries of the field of supervision.
I deal mainly here with the difficulties from the second source and refer to the first only as illustration. For it is also becoming increasingly clear that the second are harder to penetrate in supervision because they reflect the very same difficulties in established models of psychoanalysis.
I will not discuss how best to train students in general, or how best to perceive the therapist's distortions converging with his patient's. I limit my comments to critical aspects of the field of supervision itself that make such perceptions possible.
Take as our point of reference that the patient needs direct inquiry and experience rather than interpretation of his values and behavior for a genuinely psychological therapy. And consider the following question: does his therapist also need direct inquiry and experience rather than evaluation of his treatment plan and procedure for a genuinely psychological supervision of that therapy?
Recently, two very different students raised this issue in an interesting way. One thinks of himself becoming a "therapist