The Supervisory Alliance: A Half Century of Theory, Practice, and Research in Critical Perspective

Over the course of psychotherapy supervision history, the supervisor-supervisee alliance has increasingly emerged as a variable of preeminent importance in the conceptualization and conduct of the supervision experience: It has come to be embraced as the very heart and soul of supervision. But after a half century, what evidence do we actually have to justify that highly favorable outlook afforded to the alliance? What do we really know about the supervisory alliance? What do we need to know about it?

As we mark the first 50 years of supervisory alliance and look toward its future, I thought it might be useful to examine those questions and provide a current status report about the construct itself. In what follows, I (a) describe the two supervisory alliance visions that have been (and remain) dominant in the supervision literature and (b) provide a review of 20 plus years of supervision alliance research. While the supervisory alliance has accumulated solid clinical support, its empirical support appears to be more tentative and less robust. I consider why that is so, identify some missing elements in the alliance research conducted thus far and propose possible remedies to move inquiry in this area forward.