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It seems likely that the findings presented in this volume came as much from the experience of supervising students and colleagues as from the immediate encounters of the consulting room. A description of the technique of supervision which I employ may help to orientate the reader to the presentations of this chapter. My emphasis is always on the material of the session which I ask supervisees to read to me, commenting and elaborating on their notes freely, stopping the flow as soon as I feel I would have interpreted, usually prior to the supervisee's report of his interpretation. I am in the habit, with new cases, of working without background material, asking initially only the age, sex, number of siblings, marital status, number of children, whether parents are alive, occupation and chief complaint. Of course with cases presented over a period of months a considerable filling-in takes place, but always my emphasis is on the immediacy of the analytic situation, including aspects of the setting, while I leave problems of counter-transference aside as private to the supervisee.
I have found this method congenial with colleagues analysing in other languages and presenting their material in translation, even when their English is extremely limited, provided that the analyst, not his translator, reads the material and I have the typescript before me. This aspect of technique may illustrate the importance of non-verbal communication through the workings of projective and introjective identification that can occur during supervision.
As anxiety and modesty often persuade students to limit their reporting of their interpretive work to an indication of the fact of having ventured an interpretation, I have frequently