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A SIXTIES ROCK BAND ONCE ASKED something like, “How do you do what you do when you do what you do to me? I wish I knew.” This convoluted lyric could serve well as the underpinning of this article, which examines the supervisory relationship when the supervisee is an analyst working with an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. To do justice to this topic, positioned as it is at the rather congested intersection of psychoanalytic views of both supervision and the treatment of early sexual trauma, it is helpful first to address each subject independently. I begin, therefore, by discussing supervision from a relational perspective; I then offer my thinking on the particular complexities added to the relational fields of supervisor-analyst-patient when the analyst is treating an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Supervisory and clinical material are used to illustrate the theoretical points made.
As we embark on our second century of elaborating the craft of psychoanalysis, various relational models of the analytic process increasingly gain theoretical ascendancy. Many analysts now accept as a working model a two-person conceptualization of treatment; in it, analyst and patient engage in a relationship wherein central relational configurations from the patient’s internal world are enacted by both participants in the analytic endeavor. The analytic process, in this view, encompasses a dialectical volleying between enactment and observation, or interpretation, of that which has been put in play between the members of the analytic dyad. Although many debates continue to be launched about specific aspects of the analytic process—for example, disclosure of countertransference,