Supervision and Its Discontents: A Discussion of the Foregoing Papers

If psychoanalysis is among the impossible professions, supervision may well be its most impossible aspect. Supervisors are charged with promoting the professional and personal growth of the supervisee, as well as with responsibility for the welfare of the patient. They find themselves positioned in a number of complex triadic relationships: patient-supervisee-training analyst, patient-supervisee-supervisor. They may be the target of transferences displaced from the supervisee's training analyst. At times they may be the recipient of what could be called institutional transferences, including the needs/wishes of the candidate to follow the rules of the institute and aspects of competition, power struggles, and dissensions among supervisors and training analysts. Or, they may be pushed by the wish to take over and thus interfere with the supervisee's making his own discoveries and ideas about interventions. Optimally, they should avoid leaping in with their own “Aha!” or admirable interpretation, but instead allow the student to find his own way. Similarly, they must resist the temptation to be authoritarian or to simply pour information into unknowing ears or insist that theirs is the only way, the right way to do things. While they model for the supervisee how an analyst listens and thinks, they need to help the supervisee to develop his own style and not simply to ape or identify with theirs. Supervisors may need to deal delicately with the supervisee's insistence on doing things the way his own analyst did.