Chapter 3 On Psychoanalytic Supervision

Psychoanalysis has generated two forms of human relatedness that had not previously existed: the analytic relationship and the analytic supervisory relationship. While Freud discussed the analytic relationship in elaborate detail, curiously, so far as I have been able to determine, he made not a single reference in his Complete Psychological Works to supervision or to the supervisory relationship (with the exception of his work with Little Hans’s father [1909]). Nonetheless, the supervisory relationship is an outcome of Freud’s “discovery” of psychoanalysis and has become integral to the process of becoming a psychoanalyst (both during formal analytic training and in the course of the graduate analyst’s ongoing efforts to become a psychoanalyst). The psychoanalytic supervisory relationship is, consequently, an indispensable medium through which psychoanalytic knowledge is passed from one generation of psychoanalysts to the next.

I view both the analytic relationship and the supervisory relationship as forms of “guided dream[ing]” (Borges, 1970a, p. 13). In this chapter, I will explore some of the forms such dreaming takes in the supervisory setting. I will make no effort to address the multiplicity of emotional forces at work in the supervisory relationship or to be prescriptive regarding how supervision ought to be conducted. Rather, I will describe several analytic supervisory experiences (one of which is my own experience in supervision with Harold Searles) that are illustrative of different facets of the way in which I think and work as an analytic supervisor. Before presenting four supervisory experiences,

I will briefly discuss a number of ideas that constitute essential aspects of the theoretical framework for my work as an analytic supervisor.

Dreaming the Analytic Experience

In the tradition of Bion (1962a, 1970), I conceive of dreaming as the unconscious psychological work that the individual does – both while asleep and in waking life