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.
Dr. Lindon here describes an original and creative approach to individual supervision. The richness of his paper is attested to by my inability to toss off a necessarily brief discussion within a brief space of time. It is too stimulating for that; it raises too many interesting questions. Dr. Lindon provides many valuable insights into the formation of constructive identifications, while documenting well his thesis that “the major advantage of SBT is that it provides the opportunity for the working through of … unconscious resistances,” free from the pressures of the immediacy of the face-to-face supervisory situation.
It appears that Dr. Lindon prefers SBT to face-to-face supervision, irrespective of geographic considerations. I am left with major misgivings about SBT. I note that it insures against either murderous acting out or sexual acting out by either of the two participants in the supervisory relationship.
That murderous violence, at least, is no idle threat is attested to by Dr. Lindon's experience with his supervisor of 20 years ago. In a family therapy situation in which I have been working for some years with Dr. Lyman C. Wynne in the treatment of a schizophrenic young woman and her family, it recently seemed to me that all that had been transpiring for some months had been going on against a previously unseen threat that either a sexual orgy, or multiple murder, or both, would occur in the interview room. In a relationship in which such physical acting
out is automatically ruled out, there must be, it seems to me, a subtle but considerable dilution of the intensity of the supervisory relationship.
SBT insures also against supervisory situations, with both participants physically present, in which leisureliness and contentment prevail. I have found many times over that supervisory situations in which an atmosphere of relaxed intimacy prevails tend to feel reprehensible to my Methodist Episcopal superego. But it is important that the supervisor become ab