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This is a serious book about a subject much in need of further thought: psychotherapy supervision. At the same time, it is a report of a serious research project. Such projects are rare in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. If dynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are to be accepted among the sciences, such research may be the key. Therefore this is a book with serious intent and the potential to be a real contribution to our field.
Psychoanalytic supervision has been taken as the model for all dynamic psychotherapy supervision, and what has been thought about supervision for analytic work has been extended to psychotherapy without consideration of the differences between analysis and therapy. The title of this book seems to promise a focus on psychotherapy supervision. The clinical material on which the research study is based is psychotherapy; the theoretical model used to examine this material is psychoanalytic; it is, therefore, a theory that has only tenuous links to the data it is being applied to. This choice of analytic theory matched up with psychotherapy data is characteristic of much research in psychoanalysis and constitutes a weakness in such research in a broad sense. Further, the analytic theory Szecsödy uses is that of Robert Langs, a theory used by few if any analysts and seldom cited in the mainstream analytic literature. Thus, it is not a felicitous choice for a research project.
The concepts Szecsödy uses are “the frame” and the “here-and-now.” The “frame” involves all of the treatment setting: times, fees, the space where the treatment is conducted, and the “rules” of nondisclosure, not imparting information and not imposing the analyst's point of view. “Here-and-now” contrasts with “there-and-then.” The study is based on the premise that only “here-and-now”