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Deceptively simple in style, Isakower's presentations engage the most complicated of psychoanalytic topics—the conscious and unconscious interactions between analyst and analysand brought one step further into the triangular imbroglio of institute supervision. Isakower's preoccupations are eminently contemporary, assessing the inner processes of the analyst as stimulated by the analytic situation. The analyst is not conceptualized as a dispassionate observer, examining the turbulence of another person's transference. In very modern terms, Isakower says we know others only through self-knowledge. But how to explore this intimate experience in supervision without reproducing an unwelcome, quasi-training analysis or didactic lecturing, is a risky high-wire act.
At the outset, Isakower states the pain of supervising: “Why do some instructors say that they cannot do it at all? Others that they just prefer not to do it, or still others that they are getting tired of doing it?” (p. 183). I admire Isakower's directness about the agony of supervision; this dilemma is not often acknowledged publicly. As a Chief Resident in Psychiatry, my initial reaction to doing supervision was anxious responsibility and overwhelming fatigue. With my own patients I was effective, but how to recreate that process in a trainee seemed a monumental task. Twenty-five years later, I still find supervision a difficult and different task in comparison to being a treating psychoanalyst or teaching a seminar. I have spent many supervisory years trying to develop in myself the analogue of the analyzing instrument—the supervising instrument.
Indeed, I do not know just how effective Isakower actually was as a supervisor, but his discussions excited my didactic imagination, and like a good article on treatment, made me eager to be in my office