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Whenever supervision is discussed certain basic factors must always be borne in mind:
The clinical material that forms the basis of the supervisory work is always selected, is an extract, never the whole. The simple fact is that the therapist, as a rule, reports about five sessions with his patient in one session, which forces him to condense the material that he observed into considerably less than one fifth of the original time.
The methods of selection are highly personal, to a large extent unconscious, and thus almost impossible to control systematically. I wish to emphasize here that in the normal course of supervision only the factors originating from the therapist are studied more or less properly, while those originating from the supervisor and from the relationship between the therapist and the supervisor get hardly any attention.
The selection of the material presented is further influenced by the prevalent bias of the local system of supervision. For instance, some systems insist that supervision must be started and continued for a specified time while the therapist is still under analysis: in these systems, by tacit agreement, it is left to the personal analysis to deal with the therapist's countertransference difficulties, while the supervision concentrates more on the problems of psychopathology and psychodynamics, the technique of interpretation, etc. In systems which start supervision only after personal analysis, difficulties in control of countertransference form an important part of the material discussed.
We know that these problems of selecting the “right” material are further complicated by conscious and unconscious transferenees,
both of the therapist and of the supervisor, caused by the existence of groups and cliques in the local analytic set-up leading to friendships, loyalties, rivalries, frictions, and competitions.
In spite of all these well-known and openly admitted difficulties, supervision forms an integral part of the official trainin