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While reading Nancy McWilliams's new book on psychoanalytic supervision, I was reminded how little formal training or guidance—if any—I received in becoming a psychotherapy supervisor myself. Psychotherapy supervision is a specific skill set that is often overlooked in
faculty development, in both psychoanalytic institutes and academic departments. As McWilliams states in her text, many of us learn to be supervisors and to supervise based on our personal experience in supervision. There is also a wide variety of trainees—ranging from residents to early career therapists to psychoanalytic candidates—who demand different approaches to supervision and education.
While there is a deep and rich literature on psychoanalytic supervision, much of it is inaccessible or not very practical in a contemporary clinical setting. Older papers must be read through a historic lens and many of those papers are cloistered in PEP-Web, only available to clinicians affiliated with an analytic institute or academic library with a subscription. There are surprisingly few widely accessible and relevant contemporary texts on the art and practice of supervision.
Freud famously wrote very little on the specifics of his technique and did not write much about psychoanalytic education. His rules of technique were in fact recommendations. Freud appreciated the necessity of taking the analyst's personality into consideration in education, but many analysts in the mid-20th century took a more prescriptive approach to supervision and education, instructing candidates to adhere to Freud's technique and to “following the manual.”
Nancy McWilliams is a clinician, speaker, and author who does not need an introduction here. Her three previous publications, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and Psychoanalytic Case Formulation, constitute the foundation for psychotherapy training in many analytic institutes and residency programs. She is well known for being an engaging and clear writer