The Social Context of Supervision1

Supervision of a candidate's early efforts as psycho-analyst has been a subject of discussion in local, national, and international training conferences for almost thirty years. The importance of what was originally called 'control analysis' has never been questioned, but rather has been increasingly emphasized by all individuals and official groups charged with responsibility for training. Considering this fact, it is remarkable to discover the paucity of communications in the literature having to do primarily with this aspect of training. In Fenichel's 200-item bibliography on technique (1), there is only one reference (2) specifically having to do with supervision. In the more than ten years since that list was made, and despite the increasing number of articles on every aspect of technique as related to training, there have been notably few on supervision (3).

In 1952, Blitzsten and Fleming (4) added a dimension to the discussion of supervision with the idea that 'good supervision' is a continuation of 'analytically therapeutic' experience for the candidate, a concept even more pointedly stated by Ackermann (5), who found 'an important core of truth' in the consideration that the supervised analysis may be 'in effect a second personal analysis for the student'. Now such a concept introduces a notable, if not new, complication into the training relationship of supervisor and student, bringing with it the many problems of transference and counter-transference related to the psychic presence of the personal analyst (6). Many and even contradictory suggestions have been made for dealing with these problems. The older practice advocated by Kovacs (7) of having the supervisor become the training analyst (or vice versa) is no longer in keeping with present training practices, and would in any case be a questionable procedure. 'More analysis', whether called 'supplementary analysis' or 'second analysis' or 'interminable analysis' or even more recently