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.
ONE MIGHT WELL WONDER WHY a paper on the problems of psychoanalytic supervision would carry such an odd title.4 But there may be more similarity between supervision and riding to the hounds than at first appears evident. Oscar Wilde, my favorite aphorist, took a particularly dim view of fox hunting. It was, he said, a marvelous example of the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible! With a very slight shift, much the same might be said about the process of supervision. It is a marvelous example of the infallible in pursuit of the ineffable!
This may appear to be a rather strained bit of punning, but I have something quite specific in mind. First, there is something oddly infallible about the experience of doing supervision; and secondly, as we would all agree, something ineffable (or beyond words) in the process of doing therapy. In the ordinary course of my work, I spend (as I'm sure we all do) a very considerable part of my time perplexed, bored, confused, and at sea. Sometimes I dream of a mid-life career change to something simple, clear-cut, say dermatology; but when I supervise, all is clear to me! With the rare exception of the supervisee who is so confused or inchoate that I can capture no sense at all of what he's doing, the problems that the supervisee is having with his patient, the difficulties, technical and theoretical, seem to me surprisingly clear, most of the time. As far as I can tell in reports on other people's supervision, this phenomenon is not so very unique. People whom I've supervised, who seem confused to me at the time, seem to be perfectly clear when