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In psychoanalytic supervision there occurs a phenomenon wherein the patient's conflicts, needs, impulses, and defenses unconsciously communicated to the therapist are communicated to the supervisor by the therapist/supervisee. Bromberg explores this phenomenon by first defining the supervisor/supervisee "field" as dyadic and one in which "the instructor's job, therefore, is really to transmit a body of knowledge while the task is being performed, and the student's job is to keep doing it until he gets it right." The supervisor, though, does not maintain his analytic stance and may easily become didactic, withdrawn, supportive, or doctrinaire to "protect" his own security needs. However, this is an integral part of the supervisory process and occurs because "the supervisee is with no apparent awareness behaving with the supervisor like the patient is behaving with him." Two ultimate conceptualizations are presented: that this occurs through an identification or that it occurs through some variant of projective identification. Introjective identification, counterprojective identification, and the parallel process are concepts which explain the reciprocal patterns of activity between the supervisor and the supervisee. Thus, Bromberg concludes that projective mechanisms explain these phenomena in the supervisor especially; he states that "the supervisor's behavior is largely motivated by the pressure of the supervisee's need for him to reciprocate his own role."