Supervisees’ Unique Experiential Knowledge

Abstract

Patients’ personal experiences and the way in which they create an intersubjective space with significant others cannot be easily formulated and organized in semantic memories. Since the role of supervision is to reach and negotiate diverse types of knowledge, the author suggests, in this article, that for supervisors to acquire a deep understanding of patients’ experiences, they need to become competent in helping their supervisees to identify, focus, and articulate their unique and valuable knowledge of the patients’ unthought experiences. Supervisees’ physical and mental presence in patients’ struggle for recognition, influence and self‐expression gives them access to types of knowledge that could not be reached in other ways. Supervisors, who have acquired this competency, are likely to create a more mutual and freer atmosphere, in the supervisory space, for considering and discussing various perspectives of patients’ experiences. The author brings an example of how a supervisor and a supervisee sidestep the regular supervision discourse and articulate the supervisee's unformulated knowledge and of how they strive to integrate this knowledge with other existing knowledge about the patient and the therapeutic process.