After having been involved in providing supervision to peers, and to trainees and students, as well as having had my own supervision, I have come to regard the primary goals of clinical supervision to be, on the one hand, the cultivation of a reflective stance, and on the other, to help the practitioner use the concepts of transference and counter-transference (as well as other defense mechanisms) to make sense of the therapeutic relationship as it plays out in the consulting room. The nature of the relationship as revealed in the transference/ counter transference leads us to an understanding of the patient’s/ client’s orientation to others and to life. We gain an understanding of the relationship by understanding ourselves better.
My early theoretical training centred mainly on psychoanalytic and humanistic theory, but over the years I have been exposed to other orientations, including systems theory, existential thinking, and more recently, mentalization and trauma-informed approaches. These have enabled me to be open to the diversity of therapeutic practice that other practitioners bring to supervision.
“Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.” (Irvin Yalom)