Contemporary Psychoanalysis. XVII, 1981: Parallel and Reciprocal Process in Psychoanalytic Supervision. Leopold Caligor. Pp. 1-27.

The author, considering supervision as one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic education, attempts to shed light on the dynamics of the supervisory experience. He posits an ongoing process in the supervisor-therapist relationship similar to that in the therapist-patient relationship and identifies this as the parallel process. The experimental design employed to study this phenomenon consisted of supervision by the author of the two therapists, a man and a woman candidate, and the author's participation in a peer supervisory group in which tapes of the supervisory hours were used. From a case example given, several inferences are drawn: that this process is "probably always there"; that the controlling variable is the supervisor; that there is simultaneous transference and countertransference operative for patient, therapist, and supervisor; and that the "overlapping" of these transferences creates the parallel process. In a theoretical discussion of these observations, the author mentions the tension that exists between the "didactic" and the "emotional" process of learning. Sullivan's concept of participation-observation is discussed in its application to parallel process, and in the realm of field theory the "reciprocal process" ("the interpersonal response evoked in the recipient in the parallel process") is briefly cited.