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“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see nobody! And at that distance too! Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach but do not practice. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders.
My interest in the use (as distinct from the teaching) of the empathic vantage point in supervision arose out of my work with residents in the University of Toronto Department of Psychiatry over the past 10 years. As one might imagine, I encountered quite wide variations of interest in, aptitude for, and sophistication with psychotherapy, and I was often forced to recognize that there were considerable limitations on what I could hope to achieve with any given resident. In my initial eagerness to transmit my hard-won psychoanalytic knowledge and experience (including the importance of the empathic vantage point in psychotherapy) and to see those views put to wider use, I found myself offering an abundance of empathic observations and dynamic interpretations of the patient, vignettes from my own experience, explanations of theory, suggestions of technique, and occasionally confrontations of what seemed to be countertransference problems of the student.
What I then discovered, to my chagrin, was that the residents with whom I was moved to try the hardest to impart all my pent-up wisdom were the very residents who, in their own interactions with their patients,