Self Psychology and Psychoanalytic Supervision: Some Thoughts on a Contextualized Perspective

On a culturally humble psychoanalytic supervision perspective: Creating the cultural third.

“…As Hays (2007) has pointed out, any combination of those diverse variables may be highly salient for any given individual in any given context. In psychoanalytic supervision, keeping that individual complexity, contextuality, and multidimensionality uppermost in mind (Watkins, in press) would in our view be integral to the development of a culturally informed, culturally humble supervision process. During the beginning decades of psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler (1936/2005) asserted that “Everything can be different,” a catchphrase that he referred to as golden rule of individual psychology.…”

“…A relational, intersubjective approach to supervision rests on at least four critical foundational pillars: (a) neither supervisee nor supervisor has a corner on the market of objective truth and can speak as oracle about the experience of any other in the supervisory triad; (b) both supervisee and supervisor view the treatment/supervision situations through their own respective lenses or set of experiential realities, and those lenses accordingly affect and shape their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about all aspects of those situations; (c) supervisors strive to create a collaborative, coconstructed, egalitarian supervisory relationship in which supervisee agency and therapeutic potential are embraced, empowered, and emancipated; and (d) though valiant efforts can be made to share power and be egalitarian, supervision is and forever will be an inescapably power disproportionate, asymmetrical experience (Buirski & Haglund, 2001, Chapter 8; Frawley-O’Dea, 2003; Frawley-O’Dea & Sarnat, 2001; Herron & Teitelbaum, 2001; Sarnat, 2012; Watkins, 2015a; Yellin, 2014). We strive as best we can for mutuality, recognizing that it exists in the context of asymmetry (Sarnat, 2006, 2015; Watkins, in press). We strive as best we can for relational coconstruction, understanding that any such efforts are inevitably constrained by the often hierarchical and evaluative nature of the supervisory relationship (Frawley-O’Dea, 2015; Herron, 2015).…”

Constructions and their Amendments in the Supervisory Process

“…Despite patients' symbolic presence only in the minds of supervisor and supervisee, they have an influence on the intersubjective processes in supervision (Gediman, ). Writers today believe that the patient's implicit presence in the supervisory space enriches and complicates the intersubjective field by adding intersections among the participants' subjectivities, resulting in the creation of more configurations (Levy, ; Watkins, ).…”