Most analysts would agree that supervision is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic education. Despite its centrality, I know of no institutes of the Association that require supervisors to have any formal training in the theories and techniques of supervision. Learning how best to supervise is left to individual effort. The COPE workshops on supervision held at APsaA's January and June meetings offer colleagues one way of continuing to learn by sharing ideas and experiences about supervision. Two on-going COPE study groups on supervision, attended by invitation, provide an additional forum and will be featured in a future TAP column.
The workshop meets regularly on Thursdays from 10 a.m. until noon and is open to all meeting registrants. Attendance at the Winter Meeting workshop ranges between 25-40 colleagues; a dozen or more attend in the spring. Because many of the participants have made the workshop a regular part of their meeting schedule, there is a continuity to the discussions and a growing sense of community among teachers who are working together to understand the complicated task of supervision.
The two-hour sessions have been used in a variety of ways. Several meetings were devoted to participants examining written supervisory reports that had been submitted anonymously. A lively discussion ensued about what makes a report useful, how standards for report writing might be established, and how compliance by supervisors in meeting those standards can be encouraged. One meeting was devoted to the opening phase of supervision and the identification of incipient learning or teaching problems. At another meeting, Imre Szecsody reported on the education in supervision that each prospective supervisor at the Swedish Institute is required to take. In one session, Jean-Paul Pegeron discussed the course on supervision he offers candidates at the Michigan Institute and described its effect on their understanding and use of supervision.
Because many of the participants have made the workshop a regular part of their meeting schedule, there is a continuity to the discussions and a growing sense of community among teachers who are working together to understand the complicated task of supervision.
At present, an increasing number of candidates terminate their own training analyses before seeing a majority of their control cases. At one workshop meeting, this attenuation of the tripartite model of education and the resultant change in the nature of supervision was discussed. Candidates without an analyst, for instance, may well bring to their supervisors more of their unresolved conflicts, personal and professional, that their work with patients stimulates. At recent meetings, Gerald Melchiode reported on his informal survey of supervisors asking them to contrast supervision they conducted 10 years ago with supervision today. His findings indicate that a less formal approach to teaching is now apparent: Candidates and supervisors are now more often on a first name basis; changing supervisors is now an easier and less fearful process. The respondents reported, however, that many more candidates are less prepared to do analysis than in the past, because of their limited clinical experience and abbreviated education in psychodynamic psychotherapy. At the same time, because of the decreasing number of candidate applicants in some areas, fewer appointed supervisors are actually conducting supervisions. At the 2007 Winter Meeting, Elizabeth Brett from Western New England discussed her institute's attempts to address problems of supervision and its reporting. These efforts may be a model for other institutes that want to reassess their approach to supervision.
Clearly, there is no dearth of issues to discuss and things to learn about supervision. The next step in making the workshops even more useful would be to take minutes of the meetings and to circulate them among those attending and others who express interest in receiving them. In addition, the use of TAP and of a COPE newsletter or Webpage might convey to our membership the nature of our discussions on supervision.
The spring workshop on supervision is the last one I will chair. After 10 years as chair of these meetings, it is time to let another coordinate COPE's offerings in this area. I hope COPE will continue to hold these workshops. If so, I, for one, will plan to attend.
(Members may contact Robert Michels [], COPE chair, for further information on COPE study groups and workshops.)
Daniel Jacobs, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute; supervising analyst at the Florida and Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institutes. He is co-author of The Supervisory Encounter (Yale University Press, 1995).
Eslee Samberg, M.D., is editor of the COPE column.