Does Anything Go in Psychoanalytic Supervision?

Abstract

The supervisory situation should provide conditions in which learning can develop and the candidate can integrate his personal and professional experiences, theoretical knowledge, and his personality for a competent participation in and handling of the psychoanalytic situation. The supervisory process is a very complex one, influenced by many factors, among these the personality of participants, their previous experience, the structure of the training organization, and the fact of multiple determination, as well as the inherent ambiguities such as autonomy/subordination and openness in face of being evaluated and assessed. The supervisor has to establish a working platform differentiating his or her own motives from the manifold, and often conflicting, interests of all participants (analysand, analyst, supervisor, Institute—that is, “the extended clinical rhombus,” Szecsödy, 1990, p. 10). The necessity to study how supervision is conducted, as well as to train supervisors, is emphasized.

Notes

¹Deborah Cabaniss (2000, 2004) and colleagues at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research conducted studies on how candidates' progression was evaluated, judged, and experienced at the larger institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association. They found that there is a lack of clarity of the criteria to be used in judging competence of the candidates. Candidates must get credit for cases to graduate; the supervisors are the key decisions makers, and requirements are length (average 18.3 months) and the “presence of analytic process.”

²They collected the items from several resources that used competency lists for other purposes. They did rely on the everyday professional-colloquial usage of the term without further definition, thus including terms of different nature and complexity.

³The number of publications that focus on the systematic study of supervision are rather few, and hardly any have been done by candidates, such as: Kubie, 1958; Fleming and Benedek, 1966; Gross-Doehrman, 1976; Kline, 1977; Martin, 1978; Dijkuis, 1979; Wallerstein, 1981; Caligor, 1984; Sandell, 1985; Szecsödy, 1990; Cabaniss, 2000, 2004; Reichelt and Skjerva, 2002.

⁴See also Eisold (2004).

⁵ Evaluation means emphasizing mutuality, reflection, feedback, and working alliance. Problems that arise are clarified and worked through. All this is on the ego and ego ideal side, so to speak, making up elements in the internalization of an analytic attitude. Assessment has to do with certifying competence. Although this is more a superego matter, transparency and clear explicit criteria can very well be maintained (Aronowitsch, 2001). Evaluation and assessment in psychoanalytic supervision. (Note after the EPF-WPE retreat, 2001 in Amsterdam).

⁶To the conference for training analysts in 1997, pairs of candidates and recent graduates where invited together with their supervisors to discuss the theme: “Learning in supervision: A mutual experience.” Quite a number of institutes and training analysts were critical against inviting candidates, as their view still seemed to be that they have to protect the candidate from participation in their own evaluation and taking part in the discussion about how supervision and their supervisors influence their learning! The major worry was that inviting the candidate to participate at a training analysts' conference would interfere both with the learning process and with the candidates' conduct of the analyses involved. To be able to meet these concerns with some data, the organizing committee for this precongress decided to do a thorough follow up, contacting each supervisor and supervisee to learn how they experienced their participation at the conference. All respondents did stress that preparing for the conference together with the supervisor did increase the sense of collaboration, mutuality, comprehension, and mutual effort to understand the processes in the analytic, as well as in the supervisory, interaction. Most of the respondents did emphasize the positive influence of involving the candidate to reflect on, as well as to evaluate how learning proceeds and to become more aware of the positive, respectively negative influence both parties can have in this (Szecsödy, 1999).

⁷Lack of experience, skill, and knowledge, and/or defensive avoidance of information due conflicts relative to the patient (“learning problems”) and those relative to the supervisor (“problems about learning”) described by Ekstein and Wallerstein in 1958.

⁸The Extended Clinical Rhombus (Szecsödy, 1990, p. 10) describes, with the help of a diagram (which is a transformation of the original clinical rhombus, pictured by Ekstein and Wallerstein, 1958, p. 11), the mutuality of intrapsychic and interpersonal influences and relationships that exist between supervisor–staff–candidate–patient–family, community–institution, administration, leadership, and primary and secondary tasks.