Reactions of Supervisees (And Supervisors) to New Levels of Psychoanalytic Discovery and Meaning

The extreme boundaries of analysis have always been as imperfectly understood as the tract beyond the boundaries was absolutely unknown. But the way to enlarge the settled country has not been by keeping within it, but by making voyages of discovery, and I am perfectly convinced that the student should be exercised in this manner; that is, he should be taught how to examine the boundary, as well as to cultivate the interior.
— de Morgan
(In defense of the calculus some
century and a half after its
invention)

IN THIS PAPER, I WILL UTILIZE the three stages of development of the communicative approach to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a way of characterizing psychoanalytic discovery and the recognition or crystallization of new levels of meaning within the therapeutic interaction—i.e., in the material from patients, in the interventions of the analyst (or therapist—the two terms will be used interchangeably here since the principles to be discussed apply equally well to the analytic and therapeutic situations), and within their communicative interaction. With this as a basic point of view, I will center my discussion on the reactions of supervisees to these increments of knowledge. To a lesser extent, I will comment briefly on the responses of supervisors—i.e., of the