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IN RECENT YEARS, PSYCHOANALYSTS have begun to examine the specific structure of the supervisory situation and its techniques. The present paper is an attempt to explore a particular dimension of supervision seldom examined in specific fashion: the supervisory crisis. Because of the wide scope of this important topic, the present contribution will focus on a single aspect of this situation: the use of dreams spontaneously reported by supervisees to their supervisors as a means of conceptualizing and dealing with supervisory crisis situations.
It is to be stressed at the outset that the present study does not imply that supervisors should request from their supervisees the report of dreams or other personal communications. To the contrary, the model of supervision that provides the framework for the present study is focused on process note presentations from supervisees and the unconscious supervisory efforts of his or her patients. Instead, this presentation is based on a supervisory finding that on rare occasions supervisees spontaneously report dreams to their supervisors. Quite often, this occurs at a time of supervisory crisis, when a supervisee is under severe stress from one or all of the following factors: (1) A personal crisis in his or her therapeutic work and more rarely in his or her outside life; (2) an especially troublesome and highly specialized problem with the patient under supervision; (3) a special and highly disturbing difficulty with the supervisor to whom the dream is reported.
The main hypothesis to be developed in this paper is that all such dreams contain the supervisee's direct and encoded (derivative) unconscious perceptions and reactive fantasies of the supervisor, his or her work with the supervisee, and the underlying nature of the therapeutic techniques in use. This particular thesis is, of