Beyond The Couch. Alexander Wolf, Emanuel K. Schwartz, Gerald J. McCarty, and Irving A. Goldberg. New York:  Science House, 1970.

This book describes a remarkable experience in group therapy supervision conducted by speaker telephone with supervisees and supervisors over three thousand miles apart. To obtain the type of supervision not available to them in their local community, two supervisees (McCarty and Goldberg) in Seattle put in an hour-long call every Saturday to two supervisors (Wolf and Schwartz) in New York. Each session was tape-recorded, transcribed, and distributed to the participants prior to the next session. At the end of four years, the participants decided to extract viable parts of their communications and shape them into a book in the form of dialogues.

Within some 350 pages the authors manage to cover almost every possible interaction and problem in the group setting. The history of the treatment modality, the theory behind it, the alternate session, socialization, acting out, sex, violence, psychotic episodes, borderline treatment, the analytic contract, and even the physical structure of the group therapy room are all dealt with in abundant detail.

Each participant takes on a specific role and holds it fairly consistently throughout the experience. Goldberg is the skeptic, grappling with himself and others, trying to fit group treatment, particularly the alternate session, into the framework of traditional analytic tenets. McCarty tends to be the reserved participant-observer who often quickly sees what the supervisors are trying to communicate and clarifies it for Goldberg. Schwartz is the embodiment of irrepressible energy and ideas who does most of the talking, countering questions with long discourses on the philosophy and technique of treatment, yet is able to appreciate flexibility and originality in the others. Wolf is the benevolent fatherly figure who says little but when necessary cuts through the confusion of the moment.

The orientation of all four participants is strictly psychoanalytic. The unconscious is all-important. The supervisors seek to provide a theoret