ABSTRACT
It is fitting that a discussion of parallel process phenomenon be included in a monograph on supervision. For there remains something baffling and intriguing about this phenomenon, with enormous complexities which cut across many aspects of the supervisory process with which teacher and student must contend. It is my thesis that any supervisory situation of dynamic psychotherapy—individual or group, on a one-to-one basis, or in a continuous case seminar— will provide the necessary conditions for the inevitable emergence of parallel reenactments. This is particularly true for the supervision of psychoanalysis and, I should emphasize, the supervision of supervision. It is also my experience that simply being informed of the existence of the parallel process phenomenon is sufficient to predicate that supervisors and/or supervisees who previously were unfamiliar with this experience will become conscious of their direct participation in it. The emergence into consciousness of what has been occurring all along will render the experience uncanny, as the familiar but unknown becomes known and unfamiliar (unheimlich).
