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Much is written about the need for training in psychotherapy; little attention is given in this country to studying the actual process of learning, particularly in the crucial area of the supervision of clinical work. Swedish psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have for some time recognised the need to train trainers. This book studies the interaction between supervisor and trainee in the course of supervision in the hope that it will inform and direct teaching methods.
It is essentially a report of a research study carried out in the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, its purpose being to observe and clarify how learning takes place in the supervisory situation. It is in part descriptive and in part hypothesis-generating. Reading the excellent introduction and review of the literature on supervision, one realises how much of the work on supervision has come from the United States.
The research itself was carried out on four of the participants and trainers on a two-year psychotherapy training course. Treatment and supervision were both on a weekly basis, and each fifth supervision was recorded on audiotape and transcriptions, together with interviews with the participants, gave the date for the analysis which was carried out in two parts.
In the first part, an ‘educational diagnosis’ was made for each session by the use of what is described as a ‘micro-analytic’ technique; and an ‘ideal problem-solving route’ was formulated. The dialogue between trainee and supervisor was then followed, step by step, to see whether the actual supervisory interaction was conducted correspondingly or differently. Doubtless there would be many opinions on what constituted an ‘ideal route’.
The second part constituted a quantitative analysis of these same sessions. Sessions were divided into sequences which were judged and classified according to forty-eight variables, and then subjected to analysis using the Principal Component Method.
The results of the descriptive part of the study are o