Discussion of John A. Lindon's Article, Supervision by Tape: A New Method of Case Supervision

Dr. Lindon has given us a paper which contains many valuable points for supervisors and student-therapists alike. Some of these

points, such as the catalyzing of an ongoing self-analytic process in supervision or the value of “free association during the presentation” he mentions early but does not give much more attention to. Instead, he focuses on an innovative supervisory situation which he has found valuable and describes as “providing technical advantages such as freedom from geographical and time restrictions [and allowing] those seriously interested in supervision to partly overcome the difficulties that are inherent in the supervisory process.”

One characteristic of this new situation is the peer status of the participants, an element I can wholeheartedly recommend and which I am sure goes on between colleagues for both clinical and theoretical learning after graduation from an institute. There is rarely a record of these experiences. The addition of a tape recorder to the supervisory situation, possible because of modern technology, is now used by many teachers of psychotherapy and even psychoanalysis. This technical innovation has many advantages, the chief of which, in my estimation, is the preservation of a record of supervisory events that can be studied at leisure for many purposes. The tape can be listened to or transcribed and duplicated for repeated re-experiencing and study by the participants or nonparticipant observers. The record can provide much information about both the therapeutic and the supervisory process which adds dimensions not otherwise obtainable to the data to be studied. Listening to a tape is more time-consuming than reading a transcript, but it offers paralinguistic messages that a typewriter cannot catch. Several listenings to the same tape, when accompanied by notes made while listening, provide a record of evolving understanding which gives most interesting data on the learning process. This experience is important for stude