ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the provision of ongoing supervision, peer supervision, or consultation helps to ensure, among other important functions, reliable access to ethical thinking in analytic practice. It shows that the analytic attitude is in essence an ethical attitude, and that the achievement of the ethical attitude is tantamount to the achievement of a developmental position. The chapter explores the role of supervision in helping to maintain ethical thinking and practice in clinical work. It explains the role of both developmental and archetypal perspectives in the understanding of the achievement of ethical thinking through the supervisory function. The provision and function of supervision of analytic and psychotherapeutic work with individuals, children, couples, or families, creates a needed triangular space essential to the care and maintenance, the ongoing hygiene, of the dyadic relationships. In psychoanalytic theory, the importance of the negotiation of the Oedipal threesome, that archetypal triad par excellence, constitutes much of the psychoanalytic understanding of developmental achievement.
