Suggestions Towards a Theory of Supervision

When the Society of Analytical Psychology in London started to frame a programme of training for candidates there were two issues on which agreement was soon reached, the first easily, the second after some hesitation. It was decided, first, that the training should be based on clinical studies, and with this end in view candidates were to take two control cases after two years of preliminary analysis. This was in line with Jung's repeated claim that his researches are based on clinical experience even though he has often chosen, for reasons which we need not go into here, to present his conclusions in terms of mythology.

The second decision, not so easily arrived at, specified that a training analyst was to supervise the candidate's management of his control cases and to teach on such matters as arose out of the material the candidate brought for discussion.

The doubts about the second decision arose from Jung's emphasis on the importance that the analyst's personality inevitably takes in any analysis. This essential feature of his ideas on analytic practice might have led the training analysts to decide that didactic teaching of theory and technique could best be done by the seminar method to trainees as a group, leaving the rest to the candidate's analyst alone. In this way, it might be assumed, the candidate's skills would be more certain to develop out of his personality and there would be less opportunity for him to separate the acquisition of them from his own personal development. The rejection of this policy was based on the belief that it would change the role of the analyst in important respects. He might well be tempted, or even feel under obligation, to act as teacher, in the didactic sense, as well as analyst, and so be unable to give his sole attention and interest to the inner development of the candidate. This was, I think, the main reason in the minds of some training analysts at least, and in my own in particular, for instituting a supervisor who wa