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Esther Hanoch's paper provides a unique perspective about the psychoanalytic candidate's experience of supervision. As a supervisor for over twenty years and a teacher of the supervisory process for nearly ten years, I find it a rare opportunity to see such an honest, complex, and most important, a firsthand written portrayal of what it's like to be a supervisee. With few exceptions, most noteworthy and , the models, process, experience, and outcomes of supervision have been written from the supervisor's perspective. While much of the literature on supervision is a valuable body of work, often a lingering question remains: What was the experience really like for the supervisee and what would he say about the opinions and conclusions of the author who wrote about his experience? Indeed the same can be said about patients and their analysts; it would be so valuable to read patient's accounts of their treatment in addition to the vast numbers of papers we read and hear by their analysts.
Hanoch focuses on candidates' anxiety in supervision, anxiety that has complex and multiple sources. She believes this often remains hidden and not addressed, either in the supervisory encounter or by the analytic institute. Importantly, she argues that the formal evaluation process, the fact that the relationship between supervisor and supervisee is not primarily confidential is a major difficulty and source of anxiety in the supervisory relationship.
In a careful and thoughtful review of the literature, she well documents the paradigmatic shift in the theory of supervision that parallels the shifts in the theories of psychoanalysis. In our postmodern age, we have no claim to objective truth, and knowledge is limited, contextual, and relative. The supervisor can no longer be considered “above the fray,” but rather is fully