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EDUCATION, ACCORDING TO A. N. WHITEHEAD (1929), is the acquisition of the art of utilizing knowledge. This is an art which is very difficult to impart, he adds (p. 6). Most psychoanalysts are engaged in some educational pursuit, whether in classrooms, hospitals, or liaison work with other professionals. Most of us also educate through supervision; that is, teaching the art of utilizing technical knowledge and the utilization of the self as an "analytic instrument, " as defined by Isakower (Balter, et al., 1980).
The psychotherapeutic aim of supervision is to improve the quality of the analyzing instrument; that is, the student's therapeutic personality. The psychotherapeutic consequences for the supervisee derive from the supervisory experience itself and from its influence on the supervisee's concurrent analysis, if he is a candidate in training.
This presentation is an attempt to pull loose ends together. Interweaving supervision and psychoanalysis is not firmly anchored in traditional paths of psychoanalytic education. On the contrary, as Debell (1981) writes:
Perhaps one of the earliest and most persistent questions about appropriate supervisory activity is how much one should treat the analyst versus how much one should simply teach him. This is a peculiar question and becomes more strange the more it is discussed. For one thing, it is difficult to find proponents of the explicit "treatment" of candidates during supervision, certainly no one in the group1 advocates analyzing the supervisee. Still, every member of the group agrees that it is sometimes necessary to point out to the analyst certain obstructive patterns, and even on occasion to comment about and even inquire into their possible meaning and motivation. Such