Discussion of “Candidates' Anxiety in Supervision”

If I were considering entering a training program to become a psychoanalyst and I read Hanoch's article, I think I would decide to try landscape architecture instead. Although the author specifically states that the paper “focuses exclusively on its dark side,” the portrait of the supervisory relationship presented here is so dark, so beset with “anxiety, anger, and shame,” that it is hard to imagine any compensatory positive experiences that could result in making going through this torturous experience worth it.

As I recall my own four years of life as a supervisee in a very typical psychoanalytic training program, I can remember moments of the kind of anxiety described here, but the predominant recollections are of interesting, stimulating, productive, liberating, intimate, and even exciting supervisory relationships. Of course, that was all more than fifty years ago and I may have repressed and forgotten all the horrors. I do recall one real “lemon” of a supervisor who, in addition to everything else that was no good, was always late. I complained to him and to the higher-ups and was encouraged to change supervisors, which I did. A few months later, incidentally, he was dropped from the staff.

My intention in the foregoing remarks is not to deny in any way the validity of the author's cataloging of all that can go wrong in a supervisory relationship, but rather to convey that sometimes, maybe most times, it can go right. I do think the author has, most comprehensively, alerted us to the myriad pitfalls, large and small, that supervision can be subject to. But in my experience of talking to literally a few hundred graduates of training programs about their supervision experiences, the great majority are very positive about their supervision, notwithstanding some periods of anxiety and an occasional “failed relationship.” Of course there are a few who have had a bad time of it throughout their training.