Psychoanalytic Supervision
On the relationship, ethics and craft of supervising psychoanalytic clinicians.
McWilliams offers a passionate defense of the judgment, wisdom, and mentalizing capacity that supervision requires.
Nancy McWilliams sets out supervision as a craft in its own right, distinct from doing therapy and from teaching theory. Across nine chapters she moves from the history of psychoanalytic supervision through the conduct of individual and group work, the evaluation of whether a treatment is actually progressing, ethics, the politics of psychoanalytic institutes, and the particular challenges posed by differences of culture, character, and power between supervisor and supervisee.
Her central claim is that good supervision forms a clinician rather than drilling competencies: it protects the capacity to bear not-knowing, models containment, and cultivates the practical judgment no manual can supply. She treats the evaluative asymmetry of the supervisory pair as a working problem to be named, not smoothed over.
The book gives supervisors concrete frameworks for structuring sessions, reading parallel process, handling ethical and boundary dilemmas, and assessing progress, and it closes with a chapter addressed to supervisees on using supervision well.
About the author
Nancy McWilliams
Nancy McWilliams is an American psychoanalytic psychologist. She is Visiting Professor Emerita at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, where she teaches, and she maintains a private practice in New Jersey. Working within the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic tradition, she is known for accessible, integrative writing on psychoanalytic diagnosis, personality structure and character, and clinical technique. Her books, published by Guilford Press, include Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and Psychoanalytic Supervision.
Details
- 2021
- Guilford Press
- Guilford Press
- 237
- 9781462547999