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This was no time for play / This was no time for fun
This was no time for games / There was work to be done.
Of Course, Many of us are familiar with the opening lines of Dr. Seuss's classic The Cat in the Hat. In recalling how, as a first-year analytic candidate, I approached supervision, it seems particularly apt. I remember my feelings and anxieties well—this was serious business! I had a control case and a supervisor who was both a supervising and training analyst at a prestigious psychoanalytic institute, and who initially seemed to be forbidding and solemn. And yet, as I became immersed in the work, I began to consider—was it in fact no time for play? Certainly, like those two children in Seuss, there was work to be done: my learning, the patient's treatment, and the supervisor's teaching. But how exactly was this to occur? Most accounts in the literature on supervision address the supervisory process from the supervisor's point of view (Levenson, 1982; Caligor, Bromberg & Meltzer, 1984; Ekstein & Wallerstein, 1956) and what the supervisor believes to work. But what would ultimately prove helpful to me as a candidate? With the help of such distinguished psychoanalytic writers as Levenson, Bromberg, Winnicott, and yes, Dr. Seuss, I hope to describe my experiences in supervision—what was most helpful, what was less helpful—and make a preliminary attempt at delineating what may prove useful to the supervisee who is learning to be a psychoanalyst.
Levenson (1982) describes six categories of teaching supervision—(1) holding, (2) Teutonic, (3) algorithmic, (4) metatherapeutic, (5) Zen, and (6) preceptorship—and ultimately advocates the algorithmic method,