The Supervisory Relationship, A Contemporary Psychodynamic Approach. Frawley-O'Dea, Mary Gail and Sarnat, Joan E. New York/London:  The Guilford Press, 2001,  247 pages, $33.

All well trained psychoanalysts and psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists have spent many hours discussing their clinical work with supervisors. Despite the importance of this activity in professional development, excellent books focused on supervision are rare. I have file drawers filled with journal articles collected over many years of teaching supervision training classes, yet few books on my office shelves address the needs of a psychodynamically oriented supervisor, particularly one who subscribes to contemporary relational thought. I reviewed two notable texts for earlier issues of this journal: Jacobs, David and Meyer, The Supervisory Encounter (1995), and M. H. Rock, Psychodynamic Supervision (1997). Both books are well worth in-depth study. The former volume is strongly psychodynamic but less relational in perspective than the latter. While the Rock book views supervision as a relationally mediated endeavor, the text that I am reviewing here provides a definitive relational approach to psychoanalytic supervision and thus makes a major contribution to our literature.

The authors, Drs. Frawley-O'Dea and Sarnat, based this text on their model of relational psychodynamic supervision and they invite readers to use this book as a reference point from which to depart and deviate in the supervisory situation. Both authors are psychoanalytically informed psychologists. Joan Sarnat was trained at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea did her postdoctoral training at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at