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Dear Sir,
Emanuel Berman's article (IJP, 81: 273-90) will hopefully evoke the interest of many supervisors to reflect about the way they conduct supervision and relate to all the complexities and ambiguities of the supervisory interaction and the supervisory position. His paper is comprehensive, emphasising the mutuality of the learning process, and that we should be less preoccupied with formulating what we should do and more receptive of what we actually do and undergo. He does also underscore that the supervisory relationship is an encounter rich in complex transference and countertransference enactments; that the supervisor is vulnerable and has narcissistic needs to be idealised and be seen as a ‘good teacher’. He touches on many important problems: the gaps between ‘conscious wishes and the actual outcome of their encounter’ (2000, p. 280), the supervisor's dual ethical commitment to the candidate and the analysand; the delicate question of maintaining or extending the boundaries between supervision and analysis, and last but not least the complex dependence of both supervisor and supervisee on institutional dynamics. Though he does emphasise that he is not striving to define a new general technique of supervision—as the style of each supervisory dyad will always depend on the unique personality of both partners—he offers a broad range of options.
I wish to compliment Berman for all his work with and writing on supervision and would like at the same time to supplement some of the issues he raises. Most of the literature about supervision is written by supervisors, mostly conveying more or less individual and idiosyncratic views as if they constituted generally valid observations. Even studies that more systematically investigate the supervisory work focus more on how one teaches and less on how one learns in supervision. Pedagogic competence is often neither emphasised nor acknowledged as a prerequisite for providing supervision. This may be due to an idealisati