ABSTRACT
Supervision is a lovesome thing-but is it always? Like a garden it needs toil and tender nurturing so that it can flourish. Unfortunately ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.i.134), and we have to suffer obstacles and setbacks. I will examine in this chapter some sources of difficulties and how to tackle them within the context of our creative endeavour. This context must be there. We cannot drop a stitch before we have learnt to knit, nor can we ring ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ before we know the basics of soils and fertilisers. Supervision does not begin until the trainee has demonstrated within his own therapy his flair for analytic process and his potential for conducting an analytic group.1
