The Rules of the Game

IT IS AN OFTEN ATTESTED discovery in the supervision of candidates in psychoanalytic training that the excellence of their work rests only slightly on their thoretical knowledge. Sometimes their work appears much better where their theoretical knowledge is least, and at all events particular theoretical predilections rather rarely affect their competence or even their style as analysts. There are extremes, of course; and I cannot go so far as to say that it makes no difference at all what their theory is. I have after all supervised candidates of only one psychoanalytic institute, and that one fairly traditionally devoted to the ego psychology that achieved orthodox status in the 1940's, although our faculty have not been insensible to other developments. It is further always moot to what extent theory once learned subtly influences technique even after its fetters have been rationally shrugged off. Many of us whose psychoanalytic education took place in the '40's and '50's were firmly indoctrinated by injunctions to strict defense analysis that even decades of corrective experience have not fully erased.

For all that, analyst and supervisor, in the absence of excessive strains or tensions in the character of either, may sit comfortably together confronting the analyst's reports of his sessions with the patient without too much regard to the higher flights of theory. Following some remarks by Lacan (1977, pp. 44–45), I may point here to what actually occurs in supervision. The task of the supervisor is to recognize in the dialogue reported by the candidate, unconscious elements in the discourse of the patient that the candidate has not himself or herself recognized. Better still when possible the supervisor may corroborate independently the candidate's inferences, in which case the sense of conviction of both parties is the stronger. Best of all, perhaps, are those gratifying occasions when the supervisor can be shown by the analyst in training to be wrong i