Author's Response

Dr. Gill's was the first of the discussions I read, and I was delighted that he caught the spirit in which I wrote this paper: that SBT is one particular use of the tape recorder which I have found to be valuable and that I urge others to try it, to see whether they find it helpful, and to add to and improve this method of supervision. Like Dr. Lewin, I do not expect magic from a machine and think that no machine may do much better than a human intelligence. However, I do think that a machine may be used if it can help the human intelligence overcome unconscious resistances impeding use of that intelligence. When Dr. Lewin says that SBT strikes him as a right research procedure which is “after all the main purpose of any supervision, no matter how the material is presented,” he, too, has caught the spirit in which I presented the paper.

Dr. Wallerstein attributes many disadvantages to SBT: the distancing of time and space, loss of relevance, growing ennui with such a “dead” task, etc. Surprisingly, in practice none of these applies, although I can see where by logical reasoning they might seem to.

Referring to my use of the word “dull” to describe a prevailing complaint about the usual supervisory situation, Dr. Wallerstein says, “Yet here an advantage can hardly be claimed for SBT over the live article.” But that is precisely what I do claim! Things are dead only when we make them dead; otherwise they live and grow in our minds. Supervision is “endlessly dull” or dead only when there is unconscious resistance; otherwise, both supervisor and therapist are, as Fleming and Benedek report, “intrigued by the

freshness of our encounter with the material“—and they said this in describing their six years of studying the same supervisory sessions.

Dr. Wallerstein is concerned that in SBT there is an inherent drastic structural alteration of the usual teaching and learning situation. I agree that there is an alteration, but it is neither a structural nor a drastic one; the g