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To the Editor:
QUESTIONS ABOUT SUPERVISION still abound. Despite the impressive burgeoning of literature about it during the past decade, many critical issues about the contemporary ordering of supervision are still unanswered. And these are, in my view, not separate but derivative from central issues about psychoanalytic therapy itself, also still unanswered. They concern how best to study the convergences of transference and countertransference in the field of therapy in which they are always live and often interlock, also rarely planned and often unanticipated; and then, of course, how best to study them in a field of supervision once removed from the shared experience in which they first appear.
In fact, the manner in which these two fields of inquiry relate to one another—whether they are detached or derivative, divergent or descendant one from the other—is also a matter of considerable disagreement. The reason for it is not hard to fathom. The three individuals who interact in these two fields—supervisor and therapist, therapist and patient—never truly control the variable conditions and contents of their respective interactions. The relationship of supervisor and therapist does not, in any obvious sense, replicate the relationship of therapist and patient. Nor should it be expected to.
These are, among those possible, at least three major ways the supervision of psychoanalytic therapy is now being done