I probably should have started a new thread for this, but.........And I hope this will generate responses from other people as well as Dr. Pretzer.

In the training of therapists, is supervision still primarily conducted in the third person? That is, where the therapist reports to a supervisor in a separate office about the content of a session? Throughout my training this often seemed so odd, because in most every other trade the apprentice both has the opportunity to observe his teacher or mentor, and the mentor has the opportunity to directly observe and guide the student or apprentice. In a profession where so much communication takes place outside the literal utterance of words on both the therapist's part and the patient's part, I have always been puzzled by the supervisors distance from the actual treatment and the assumption that progress can adequate determined in this way. Since it it clear from all the postings here that CBT is not simply a technology to be followed or a checklist to be followed, is anything happening to improve the training of therapists. I am sure I am not the only one to have wondered about this, but I rarely read about other training models. Of course, I understand that the typical supervisory model is the most time effective and I guess cost effective system to follow--- has a combination of supervisory methods been tried?? And I'm talking about a sustained supervision where the supervisor is always in the therapy room? Psychodynamic training programs always had their reasons for not doing this- although for training purposes these reasons never made sense to me.

Thanks--

Doug