The Supervisor as the Liberator*

Liberating supervision, or supervision as liberation, are the names which have come to my mind as titles for this paper. Supervision—the name alone can induce tension, anxiety, or at least apprehension in the growing psychoanalyst. Of course it does not have to have this effect. The supervisory relationship will always depend on the two personalities involved. But in many people the inequality of the situation alone is apt to arouse the whole oedipal constellatin of conflicted feelings. What will be examined and discussed is nothing less than one's entire spectrum of knowledge, one's skill in social intercourse, and one's anxieties, which one would like to keep private until they are overcome. In this situation, where one can be looked through and through, vulnerabilties are naked and raw.

Those sessions with the patient, being unsure of what the right word was or which one should be used, are difficult enough. There might have been anger expressed, or just a visible distrust, a resistance to the process of analysis. One expects it, of course, but when confronted, the experience can be devastating. And always the thought, will the patient come back? what if he were to stop coming? I do not have to say more to illustrate the average supervisory situation, particularly of the beginner.

The supervisor can also be a beginner. He should at once be a teacher of theory, or at least of the how and when of its application in practice, a psychoanalyst who can see the difficulties in the light of psychodynamics involved, an advisor on problems of technique,