ABSTRACT
The communicative approach has generated a series of unconsciously validated principles for the methods. The supervisor must work from a well-established, basic model of the mind and of the therapeutic interaction and should base his or her comments on an assessment of the moment-to-moment transactions of a given session. A supervisor is mandated to intervene if his or her supervisee has been silent for a long time in a session, if an inappropriate silence is detected, or if the supervisee has intervened actively. Supervisory work is always cast in the framework of an active, ever-present, spiralling conscious and unconscious interaction between patient and therapist. Perhaps the greatest threat to effective supervisory work lies with the fact that a supervisor must do his or her work using the highly defensive conscious system. The inclination and temptation to use the supervisory situation to express and gratify a supervisor's inappropriate or pathological needs is enormous.
