Prologue

The role of the teacher is often a conservative one. In addition to the transmission of knowledge and techniques, teachers are frequently entrusted with the preservation of the values and traditions of their discipline. Nowhere has this been truer than in psychoanalytic training. Until recently, psychoanalytic educators tended to rely on a narrow and limited version of psychoanalysis characterized by a close adherence to Freud's papers on technique. However, clinical experience demanded modifications to Freud's technical recommendations so that clinician-teachers were faced with significant discrepancies between the realities of their practice and the ideals that guided their teaching. Supervision continued to be governed by this conservative trend, and the resulting discrepancies remained hidden and never adequately resolved. This tension between the conservative demands of analytic education and the modifications to technique and theory required by clinical experience was manifest by the absence, in the early literature on supervision, of material illustrating the actual events of supervision. In addition, the status quo was effectively maintained through the failure to examine, in detail, the basic assumptions of the prevailing models of supervision.

The breakthrough came with Ekstein and Wallerstein's book, The Teaching and Learning of Psychotherapy, first published in 1959. These authors expanded the theory of supervision beyond the mere didactic teaching of technique. They emphasized the significance of resolving the supervisee's learning problems in the context of the examination of his transference and countertransference issues. Equally significantly, they opened up psychoanalytic supervision for detailed examination by studying the actual interactions between supervisor and supervisee. Their innovations were elaborated by