ABSTRACT
The question of how to train psychodynamic therapists in graduate school, relying heavily on the supervision of their treatment of patients as the modality of teaching, is a central issue in clinical psychology education. As someone who experienced extensive psychodynamic therapy supervision (including exposure to supervision by six different psychoanalysts, such as Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm in my own institute training) and who has conducted supervision of graduate students and some analytic candidates for 35 years, I looked forward to this symposium. After reading the papers, I found myself in somewhat of a dilemma. It seemed as if I was adrift in a sea of jargon and theory and that somehow I had lost touch with the real students I have worked with and their very real patients who were coming to these young incipient therapists desperate for help with urgent problems in living. I had to confront the question: What are these papers about? Are they confronting the charge posed by the Symposium Chair, Dr. Ochroch, which I read as describing the training of graduate students and addressing differences between psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy in the training process? What was presented, however, in at least two of the papers, was heavy doses of theory and a kind of abstraction that failed to confront some of the basic realities of the supervisory situation in a graduate school. What are the formal relationships that actually exist between supervisees and supervisors? What is the ultimate target of the supervisory process—the expansion of the trainee's psyche or the welfare of the patient? Is supervision designed to teach the psychoanalytic process or at least some modified form and, if so, what brand-name version of analysis? Since these are graduate students in psychology, not yet psychoanalytic candidates, ought we not train them more generally for effective intervention rather than focus on a very specific procedure or narrow theory-driven approach? How much ought we to be delving into their fantasies and private experiences, especially since, in contrast to a psychoanalytic institute, 1) we never warned them of this possibility in our graduate school brochures, and 2) our roles as mentors and evaluators are different from those we assume as therapists?
