You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Drs. Jacobs, David, and Meyer have given us valuable ideas on supervision in a thought-provoking book that deserves serious consideration. It appears at a time in our professional development when we find ourselves questioning the entire psychoanalytic endeavor—teaching, practicing, theorizing—through the lens of interaction and reciprocity.
In this context, the authors quote Isakower, who worried that psychoanalytic supervision was in a certain kind of danger. “In his [the supervisor's] main capacity, he is a therapist and not an educator. I maintain that this can constitute a disturbing interference…. Analysts when engaged in the capacity of educators should be particularly alert to a potential liability of slipping from a didactic into a therapeutic attitude toward the student, especially so in supervision” (p. 39).
The Supervisory Encounter is written to help supervisors deal with the rumblings of psychic life while helping them to maintain a steady balance between authority/complementarity and analyzing/teaching.
The authors write:
This book offers a model of supervision and a vocabulary that are not based on the student's intrapsychic conflicts and an associated vocabulary of clinical pathology to describe an educational process. Instead, we emphasize a careful, ongoing evaluation and description of the student's capacity to expand his thinking and enlarge his ability to use his feelings in forging a better understanding of himself and his patients…. teaching psychotherapy has too often depended on the authority of the supervisor…. We
Page 82develop a contrasting model that calls for mutual collaboration and joint discovery…. (p. 27)
The authors ask an implicit question that has vexed psychoanalysts from the beginning and that grows out of an interesting first chapter in which they discuss the history of psychoanalytic supervision: How much can supervisors who are not analysts educate candidates in the technique of analysis? This question then fractionates into several o