Training analysts from around the world will have a chance next summer to participate in a conference featuring small-group discussion of topics relevant to their special functions. The Seventh IPA Conference of Training Analysts, slated for July 28–30 in San Francisco, continues a biennial tradition of holding such conferences in conjunction with IPA Congresses.
In the International Psychoanalytical Association, only some analysts are qualified to supervise candidates and conduct training analyses. In conducting these analyses, analysts can call on their formal training, their course work, and their own experience of being analyzed. But the situation with supervision is different. As most institutes offer no formal training in supervision, how is one to judge one's supervisory work? How can one learn to supervise better? How is one to deal with special problems in supervision that never came up in one's own training?
It is especially important that the material of supervision be kept confidential. Supervisees, after all, will one day be colleagues, and their difficulties should not be public information. As cases of special difficulties in supervision cannot be published, the usual modes of information sharing do not work in this area. Face-to-face contact in a small group, where confidentiality can be relied on and where members of the candidate's institute will not likely be present, is therefore of special importance.
Attending a conference before an IPA Congress may strike some as overkill. But because this conference is a gathering of training analysts, it has a special place in an analyst's experience. The conference held two years ago in Amsterdam raised issues around the differentiation of supervision from the training analysis. An important theme was the necessity and difficulty of deciding when countertransference should be dealt with in the candidate's analysis and when it belongs in the supervision. Among the more delicate issues raised in Amsterdam were what to do (1) when the candidate has already terminated analysis and a countertransference problem comes up in the supervision, and (2) when the supervisor believes the candidate is not conveying to the analyst the seriousness of a countertransference problem.
At the Amsterdam conference, participants were enthusiastic about continuing the theme of supervision two years hence. Comments included: “A very lively and enriching experience”; “High quality of discussion. Small groups ideal format to develop more intimate group focus”; “Continue next time”; “Discuss tensions within institutes and the supervisors responsibilities toward the supervisee, the supervisee's patient, and the institute.” Groups in San Francisco will deal with these topics and undoubtedly with many more.
Those who would like to suggest additional topics or present cases for discussion are urged to contact one of the two co-chairs for North America: Dan H. Buie, Jr., Wellesley Hills, MA (Fax 617–237–7120) or Arlene Kramer Richards, New York, NY (Fax 212–427–0585).