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Dr. Lindon in this article has presented, not only a new method of “supervision” of a candidate or young colleague, but a tool for broadening the dimensions of the relationship between both participants.
“Supervision” is a term applied to the requirements for graduation from an Institute and membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association. It assures that the mediocre, but not impossible, candidate will attain the first, or both, of those certificates that will allow him to be a card-carrying member of the profession of psychoanalysis. This requirement assures that the minimally talented candidate will become a plebeian practitioner. However, if an Institute selects its candidates with reasonable care, it should have a fairly large group of its candidates who have a potential for creative utilization of their knowledge and skill in the therapeutic use of psychoanalysis. It is this group that probably gets the least enrichment from supervisory hours. I would suggest that a member of this group, after supervision of his early cases in which
routine technical aspects are mastered, and his own professional identity as an analyst is beginning to take shape, does not require “supervision” or “apprenticeship to a master.” I would even question Dr. Lindon's formulation that “supervision should lead to a learning alliance which fosters benevolent supervisory introjects from which the therapist unconsciously, via selective identification, creates his own autonomous professional ego.” In my opinion, the relationship between the young and the senior analyst at that point should become a transactional one in the form of a dialogue. The more senior analyst should offer the knowledge he has gained from his years of experience; the younger should bring to the dialogue the freshness of a beginning explorer. From the interchange of these two viewpoints should result either an integrated concept or a challenge to both participants to think further. In such a dialogue, what was