Abstract
Over the last decade the burgeoning interest in the supervision of counselling and psychotherapy has produced a growing body of literature in the field. This work presents a useful contribution to that literature. Several authors examine psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and Jungian approaches to the supervisory relationship. All are experienced supervisors, or supervisors of supervisors, and professional members of the British Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision (BAPPS).
The volume offers work from the heart of each author's experience as a supervisor. This is its great strength. Experienced supervisors will recognise the dilemmas acknowledged, the complexities addressed, the questions raised. Experienced supervisors will be relieved to know that other people have been there, and, while not pretending to know the answers, are tackling the problems.
One of the authors comments with wry amusement on the senior clinician who regarded supervision as a well-earned ‘relief from seeing patients’. Readers of this work are challenged to recognise that the practice of supervision requires skills developed specifically for the task, and honed, preferably through supervision of the supervision. The least it requires is that skills are honed through thoughtful experience, which seems incompatible with the attitude that it is a restful alternative to the stress of seeing patients.
Not all of the chapters are of equal merit. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Solitude and solidarity: a philosophy of supervision’ is written from such a fully Jungian perspective as to be difficult for readers from other perspectives to digest. This is a minor quibble in a collection of papers that has considerable merit overall. In chapter 6, there is a description of a single group supervision in South Africa just before the 1994 election that stays long in the mind. Ethical dimensions of supervision are addressed, not to provide answers, but more to raise questions, to increase awareness of potential problems, and implicitly invite readers to consider what they would do in such circumstances.
I recommend this book to all supervisors of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy trainees might also find it of interest. It offers food for thought in many areas of supervision. It also offers that pleasant sense that one is not alone in confronting the complexities of the task.