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The 7th IPA Conference of Training Analysts was held on 28 and 29 July at the Marriott Hotel in San Francisco, just prior to the 39th IPA Congress. The theme of the Conference was ‘The multiple functions of the supervisor, his relationship with the supervisee, with the patient, with the supervisee's analyst, with the theoretical frame of reference and with the Institution’. The Organising Committee consisted of Germano Vollmer Filho, Han Groen Prakken, Arlene Richards, Dan Buie and Ricardo Bernardi.
The previous Conference of Training Analysts (Amsterdam, 1993) was entitled ‘Psychoanalytical supervision: a clinical approach’ and the Committee was chaired by Betty Joseph. As David Sachs pointed out in his opening lecture, the Amsterdam Conference intended to compare the theory and practice of supervision in Institutes throughout the world, discussing the problems that the supervisors had referred to through vignettes. Those vignettes showed the variety of functions that the supervisor had to fulfil. The choice of the theme for the San Francisco Conference grew out of the closing stages of the Amsterdam Conference, where this complexity of functions and relationships became evident. At the end of this Conference, the majority of the participants agreed to continue the discussion of this topic in San Francisco.
The title of the San Francisco Conference, referring to the multiple functions of the supervisor in his different relationships, was chosen mainly to allow a wide-ranging study of the supervisor's multiple functions, such as managing the supervisory process, acting as a model for identification, teaching technical and theoretical procedures, as well as acting as representative of the psychoanalytical institution in the development of the candidate. These multiple responsibilities were spelt out in the announcement of the Conference: