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Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are taught through a combination of traditional classes with supervision of cases. In the case of psychoanalysis, the training analysis is the third vital component. Given that supervision is the major place where the detailed clinical experience of senior colleagues is communicated to newer therapists, it is perhaps surprising that supervision has received comparatively little attention in the analytic and therapeutic literature.
The book under review is one of several recent contributions remedying this situation. It contains a number of papers discussing psychoanalytic approaches to supervision of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
The first characteristic that struck me is that the book consists of 26 chapters in under 220 pages of text. Not surprisingly, most of the contributions are exceedingly short, some as short as two pages. The second notable characteristic is that, for reasons that are never specified, all the contributors are psychologists. It would be interesting to know how this choice was made.
The chapters themselves fall in four sections, an initial section of nine chapters covering a wide variety of issues, and the three subsequent sections comprising the proceedings of three symposia, on “Gender Issues in Psychoanalytic Supervision,” “Psychoanalysis versus Psychotherapy: Different Approaches in Supervising Graduate Clinical Students,” and “The Psychoanalytic Supervisory Process.” Given this diversity, it is no surprise that the book as a whole does not have a coherent identity. These papers make abundantly clear that, just as there is no agreement about the best analytic or therapeutic technique, so there is no consensus regarding the best approach to supervision. It would probably be fair to say that this book represents as many approaches to supervision as it contains chapters. The classic positions are represented here: Supervision is the teaching of technique through case discussion. Supervision is a quasi-analy