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When this book was first published in 1966, it was widely hailed as an outstanding contribution to psychoanalytic pedagogy. The years have proven that this enthusiastic reception was more than merited, and the work is now fittingly republished as Monograph I in Classics in Psychoanalysis, a categorization which it truly deserves.
Being a good psychoanalytic supervisor is not the same thing as being a good clinician, although the latter is, of course, a prerequisite. Doing good supervision is a complex business, a fact that we have long recognized in our literature but tend to overlook in actual practice. In most psychoanalytic institutes the positions of training and supervising analysts, while separate in name, are treated for all practical purposes as if they were identical. Appointment to the position is made on the basis of the institute's estimate of clinical rather than supervisory abilities (political considerations aside). There is usually no special training for doing supervision, the expectation being that the new supervisor will learn by on-the-job training, reading, and experience. As the authors clearly document, this attitude is wrong-headed. They contend, and I think they demonstrate that supervisory work requires as much and perhaps more sensitivity than is necessary for clinical work, since the supervisor must be attuned not only to the relationship between the patient and the analyst1 and the progress of the analytic process between them, but also to the relationship that he himself has with the analyst.
The vicissitudes of these interlocking relationships form the content of this book, which is actually the report of a research project in which ten supervisory hours from each of two candidates were tape recorded and studied. Both candidates were being supervised by both of the authors. These tape recordings, which constitute the basic data, were supplemented by a variety of other data sources, the most important of which was the authors' ex