ABSTRACT
The supervisor is likely to be concerned about his mixed relationship with the supervisee: its three components — work, social, and supervision — are bound to be sources of confusion and conflict. The irregularity of the supervision might well give the supervisor pause for concern should anything go awry with the supervised case. In particular, making supervisory pronouncements from notes read in advance of the supervisory session precludes prediction and the use of encoded validation in the material from the patient that follows a supervisory proposal regarding technique and the like. Returning to our vignette, through empathy we can sense too that the lack of a stable structure for the supervision must have been disquieting for all concerned. The anxieties and pressures of learning how to do dynamic psychotherapy are enormous. Teaching activities do not go well when they are conducted within unstable conditions or with inconsistent techniques.
