What do training analysts do on their summer vacations? For over three hundred training analysts from all over the world, the answer to that question was to spend one evening and the following two days in San Francisco meeting with other training analysts to discuss problems encountered in the supervision of analytic candidates. At the seventh IPA Conference of Training Analysts (held July 27–29, just before the main congress), serious discussion was interspersed with having fun, meeting old friends, and consideration of a most peculiar situation: everyone there had been qualified as a supervisor, but hardly anyone had any formal training in how to supervise. This anomaly in our training procedures had been noted before and had led to an initial conference devoted to supervision before the 1993 Congress in Amsterdam. At that conference it was decided to take up the topic again at San Francisco.
Every analyst has been supervised. At some institutes, trainees are supervised by three or more supervisors, at all institutes by at least two. This supervision is often the main experience a newly appointed training analyst can draw on for a model of how to do supervision; thus, it has the side benefit of being an informal training in how to supervise. Experiencing the supervision of psychotherapy cases prior to analytic training, as well as continuous case seminars and peer supervision during and after formal analytic training, can give training analysts a wider range of choices in developing a style of supervision. Discussing supervisory experiences with colleagues can further enrich the supervisors experience.
The conference addressed this last possibility. Participants had the rare opportunity to talk about problems in supervision in a setting in which their issues would be seen not as referring to a particular candidate but as more universal problems having to do with the process. This frees the supervisor to discuss problems that might cast a shadow on a candidate's career were they discussed in an institute context, but that might impede the candidate's development if they are never discussed.
The form of the conference reflected its purpose. Welcoming remarks by Horacio Etchegoyen and a brief introduction by Germano Vollmer led into a morning of small group discussions. Vollmer talked on the topic “The Multiple Functions of the Supervisor: His Relationships with the Supervisee, the Supervisee's Analyst, the Patient, the Theoretical Frame of Reference, and the Training Institution.” He emphasized the emotional learning in supervision, cautioning the group about the dangers of imitation through projective identification, which can defeat the desirable process of learning by internalization. The groups then went off for two days of learning by experience. Of the twenty-three groups, two were conducted in German, two in French, five in Spanish, and the rest in English. Despite the difficulty of putting together groups speaking the same language while including no more than a single member from any given institute, a good mix was obtained. It helped that some participants were willing to present material in their second or third language, thus giving groups a chance to hear material very different in theoretical orientation from what they hear at home. In each group, a presenter gave a written report of a problematic supervisory session or process to serve as a focus for discussion. Participants stayed in their group for two more sessions that afternoon and for another session the next morning. After lunch on the second day, the participants came together for a final plenary session. At that meeting Eva Lester gave a wrap-up address, bringing in the literature on supervision and some integrating concepts.
Lester separated the process of supervision into a teaching process and a learning process. She had read all of the presentations made to the small groups; from these she generalized that those who adhered to the learning model encouraged candidates to have a free-associative experience without process notes, while those who adhered to the teaching model insisted on process notes and taught theory more actively. She also discussed the report from a candidate summarizing discussions among members of IPSO.
The candidates gave two very important messages to supervisors: (1) countertransferences to the patient should be pointed out by supervisors; (2) the supervisor should not have so much power in judging the candidate's progress through analytic training. This was a call for a supervisory function resembling the role of the training analyst in nonreporting institutes. Candidates want supportive and critical supervision, but not a situation in which they feel unable to be candid with supervisors lest their difficulties be reported to the institute. In a final discussion period, participants agreed to continue with the topic of supervision at the next conference and requested greater input from candidates. The next conference is to be held in 1997 in Barcelona, with Dan H. Buie as chair.