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ARTHUR FEINER'S EXPLORATION OF the contradictions in the supervisory process is a welcome extension of this author's now familiar penchant for venturing into issues that most psychoanalysts either ignore or avoid. The details of psychoanalytic practice, supervision and training are not nearly as neat as we would like to think. Indeed, ours is a field torn by emotions and their conscious
and unconscious effects so that ideals are scarce and even difficult to identify. Still, this state of affairs should come as no surprise, especially in light of the highly compromised evolved design of the emotion processing mind (Langs, 1992b), (1993b), (in press a) —we truly are doing the best we can given the remarkable inadequacies of conscious system functioning, our only available adaptive resource.
Feiner's paper extends recent investigations, my own included (Langs, 1978), (1979), (1994), (in press a), into the cognitive and especially noncognitive— the contextual or frame-related —dimensions of the all-important supervisory experience. He very aptly characterizes the many pressures experienced by a student of psychotherapy that lie beyond the immediate problems inherent to the educational goals of the supervisory process.
Among the many important issues that he raises, I would like to comment briefly and selectively on three: first, the problem of theoretical biases in a supervisor; second, the proposed contradiction between compassion and standards; and third, the conflict between learning openly and simultaneously being evaluated.
The problem of theoretical biases among supervisors is complemented by similar tendencies in supervisees who, on the whole, select mentors on the basis of preferred theoretical positions, thereby rendering the situation rife for undet