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Toward the end of their book, Frawley-O'Dea and Sarnat write: “Psychoanalysis seems to be inviting into its corridors, and even into its inner sanctums, new, questioning, vibrant voices prepared to enlarge and enliven the discourse in which analysts engage” (p. 229). The publication of The Supervisory Relationship supports their observation. It is an interesting, imaginative, and to my mind, controversial addition to the growing literature on supervision. The authors believe, as I do, that the “supervisory medium should carry the message the supervisor is trying to teach” (p. 3).
Since Frawley-O'Dea and Sarnat come from the intersubjective, contemporary, relational school of psychoanalysis, they present a method of supervising that emphasizes particular analytic goals: making patients aware of their unconscious repetitive relational patterns and bringing into consciousness their dissociated (in contrast to repressed) split-off self states. To do so, the authors maintain, analysts must acknowledge the intersubjective aspect of therapeutic relationships and accept the inevitability of enactments and the opportunity for analysis that they afford. At times, the authors continue, analysts should be willing to disclose to their patients what they, the analysts, bring to the cocreated dyadic relationship.
In order to teach this contemporary approach to analysis, Frawley-O'Dea and Sarnat recommend a form of supervision in which both student and supervisor are “engaging in a process of mutuality and negotiation, and shared power, authority, and vulnerability” (p. 4). This means that the relationship of supervisor