THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR
PSYCHOANALYTIC AND
PSYCHODYNAMIC
SUPERVISION
April 2007
Foreword
Chris
Driver (Chair)
It gives me great pleasure to
introduce this Newsletter. Supervising is a challenging profession and none
more so than in a training setting. Such
settings inevitably include a range of dynamics including supervisee anxiety,
organisational demands and clinical experience.
This edition includes four lively and thought provoking articles in
relation to various aspects of supervision in training settings by Warren
Colman, Jackie Gerrard, Mary Spencer and Nigel Williams and I would like to
thank them all for their interesting contributions and for sharing their ideas
about supervision and training.
Other aspects of this Newsletter
provide information about BAPPS and its activities.
Firstly I would like to draw your
attention to BAPPS’s forthcoming conference on May 19th. This will be a fascinating day with Joy
Schaverien speaking on, Breaking The Spell: Countertransference Enchantment and
the Erotic Transference in Supervision.
Details about booking are given in further on in this Newsletter
Secondly I would just like to briefly
update you on developments on the broader perspectives in terms of UKCP and
BACP and other activities relating to supervision.
Geri Dogmetchi and Penny Wise have
just returned from the UKCP AGM and will be updating us on developments but
with statutory registration moving forward for the counselling and
psychotherapy profession we are operating in changing times.
The changes within UKCP, in order to
prepare for statutory regulation, mean that we need to renegotiate our position
and the UKCP working party on supervision and training has been shelved until a
later date. We are also awaiting developments on the Independent Complaints
Organisation as it does not cover the requirements in relation to supervision
and we have not signed up to this as yet.
Within the BAPPS executive we are continuing to consider developments
within both UKCP and BACP and will update members on this at the AGM in the
Autumn.
On a positive note however the UKCP
Conference on Supervision went well and Penny and Geri continue to represent us
at UKCP events and Kristiane at the BACP supervision forum which ensures that
BAPPS continues to have a high profile within the profession. In addition BAPPS as an organisation is
becoming more widely known and a number of organisations are now in touch to
ensure their trainings meet our entry criteria.
Finally I would like send a heartfelt
‘thank you’ to Catherine Cooper, Lynda Norton and Annie Power for their hard
work in gathering together these articles and producing this Newsletter and to
all BAPPS members for all the work you do to keep BAPPS running smoothly and
professionally.
The next Newsletter will focus on
supervising work with Addictions so if any members would like to write a short
piece on this for the next Newsletter please let us know.
In the beginning ….
Nigel Williams[1]
The scene is a busy counselling service/training centre at the start of
the training year, with a new cohort of trainees allotted to supervision
groups, and a new supervisor (me),hidden amongst the known and familiar faces.
It is fascinating to be in an institution for the first time, it’s the
only time it ever happens, so I must pay attention, I might learn something!
I’m aware of how I am in the same position as my supervisees without them
knowing it (yet!). I’ve not seen the paper work, I haven’t experienced the
clinical culture of this organisation, and I don’t yet have a sense of the
client/user group. I’ve just moved into the area, I don’t even know where to
get a cup of coffee!
I study the paperwork carefully; it is good, thoughtful, linking supervisee to supervisor and supervisor to organisation. There are helpful suggestions as to what to cover with trainees in the first six to eight weeks before referrals start. Everyone has been assessed as ready to see clients, so….how long did it say? That’s two months without clients! Surely there is only so much rehearsal possible? Surely even the most informative article on the therapeutic frame, or case studies on the therapeutic alliance, only so much on contracting, only so many role plays (if you think they help)? This puts “All dressed up & nowhere to go” onto a new level of piquancy!
Clearly my three supervisees are very anxious, it’s contagious and I
feel we are ready almost straight away! I start to get interested in our
anxiety, & wonder, if we didn’t do any or many of the tasks recommended,
what we would talk about. We don’t have our parallel counter transference yet,
the familiar presence of absent others in the group, the supervisees don’t know
this yet, but I’m sat with them minus my most familiar and reliable compass! I
want to know what we have, in this time before supervision is supervision. I
wonder if we can explore it, maybe it will help what comes next?
We have a conversation about our imagined and known strengths and
weaknesses, a gradual getting to know something of each other. It’s not a
therapy group, but I want them to know by experience how I think and talk about
people, including what I’m prepared and not prepared to say about myself and my
experiences. In this slow opening up I realise that what are talking about is a
fine tuned rehearsal for what is to come, and they are telling me what they
need and fear, and are starting to get to know what I need from them in order
to be able to supervise. It’s a process of attunement and confidence building
but also, I reflect, one in which considerable dependency has already built up.
Will there be room for these new invisible group members when they come without
a ‘by your leave’ from the clinic?
I became minded of an approach to learning that comes from the Group
Relations tradition, that helps people working together think about their
roles, both “in here”, in the group and “out there”, in other parts of the
organisation. With some trepidation (it’s role play of course!), I invited them
to try it. The details are lengthy, but the essential detail is that the
invitation is to consider each role in the room in a structured but reflective
way. Each supervisee consequently has a chance to think about what it is like
in their experience to be a supervisor receiving a presentation, a supervisee
giving one and a group member listening/responding/introjecting.
They quickly realised that the supervisee/client are a couple in the
group and that this dynamic is something the supervisor and others have to
recognise and work with. This greatly demystified an aspect of the supervisor’s
role, and gave them a sense that by finding an early and surprising (to them)
level of insight that other learning from experience could be expected. We even
got to talk about the triangular nature of supervision, and rivalry between
couplings in the group before the first client arrived! This latter discussion
may have been premature or even precocious, but I also feel it strengthened our
working alliance before the group filled with clients.
Actually I’m really glad we had this chance of team building, because
the particular mix of clients in the first few months brought agonies of
various kinds to each supervisee, it was in short an unusually difficult start!
So in the beginning….did it help, or would it have been better just to
go straight into the hurly burly of it? Or better to have done all the paper
work and exercises and reading? My being new to the organisation helped, being
in the organisation, not of it, not yet having the “Organisation In Mind”
imprinted on me, perhaps allowed me the freedom to engage in this way. I think
I’d do it again if I had the chance, but genuinely fresh beginnings are few and
far between in this work and the wisdom of existing arrangements and ways of
doing things are powerful defences against anxiety.
The Case of the Missing Clients
Mary
Spencer[2]
When I was a supervisor of groups of
trainees on a university counselling training, where trainees were required to
find themselves a placement, preferably before the course commenced, it was
usual to find one or two in a new group who had not yet done so. It could be
significant if a trainee delayed taking on practice while others became quite
anguished about unexpected delays, perhaps for a police check. The result was
that trainees would begin the group at different developmental stages, some
perhaps having been in practice for several weeks, months or even years, with
previous experience of supervision, while others were beginners in counselling
and supervision, regarding the more experienced ones with clients already as
the experts. Over the two years of the training, the group would become more
cohesive as all gained experience.
Recently I have had a very different
experience at a counselling centre, where I was asked to take on a supervision
group of trainees from the same training, who were just starting their
practice. Only one had some previous experience in bereavement work. In this
case the group began in a very different place with no clients at all. I knew
there would be a wait for clients & that some supervisees might be
beginning their own therapy, a requirement before practising for this training,
but I could not have anticipated that the start of the group would coincide
with a dearth of suitable referrals, so that the waiting time stretched out for
fifteen weeks!
Expecting some
weeks’ delay, I planned ‘starting in practice’ work for the group, which would
also help the group to get to know each other and start to work together. As
well as group presentations on key concepts, discussion of assessments and case
studies, skills practice, there was valuable space for roleplay practice in the
actual setting, of the practical aspects that concern a new counsellor such as meeting
a client in the waiting area, starting and ending the session, settling the fee
(working with a sliding scale). Many trainees find difficulty in stating
aspects of the contract such as payment for missed sessions. With this group,
there was time to play with ways of addressing these knotty problems, each
person perhaps taking a different approach to working with an issue. I think
this time also began to create a transitional space so that the waiting period,
enabled that “space for thinking” (Mollon in Shipton 1997) to develop strongly
for this group. There could be for me, a focus on the supervisory task of
“enabling the supervisee to play with the therapeutic material or to engage
more creatively in the supervisory relationship” (Thomas in Driver & Martin
2005 p.119).
During this
time of gestation for the group, my countertransference was like a nurse in an
antenatal clinic, with an atmosphere of expectancy, excitement and sometimes
apprehension but I also began to feel abandoned by the organisation. At last,
the big day arrived, when a client was referred to the counsellor with more
experience (as might be expected). Again, the eagerness in the group was very
like getting ready to greet the new baby, while I felt like the midwife, all
the preparations in the nursery, now to be put to good use. Jealousy was
expressed as well as relief that the next stage of development was beginning.
Since then,
difficult and painful group dynamics have needed to be addressed because for
this group, over time, experience has become more diverse. This was because the
delays in referrals continued, and the last group member did not begin work
with a client until several months later. It was hard for those without clients
or later on only one, while the first to begin practice had three clients, with
mixed feelings of pleasure and discomfort. Others began the group with
eagerness and expectancy but were now having to come to terms with a gradual
realisation that, through no fault of their own, they could not hope to complete
the required hours of practice for their training within the two years or even
the hours needed for writing the final case study, which would also involve
further costs. All of this brought up sibling rivalries both within the group
and with other groups and oedipal issues with the organisation as a withholding
oedipal third. To me it felt like the disappointment of a long difficulty in
conceiving, a potentially fertile time passing by, when others already had
their babies. In my countertransference
I was aware of a sense of failure as if I had let down the group but I
also felt let down by the organisation.
Addressing
dynamics in the group was a valuable opportunity for modelling, for learning to
reflect on therapeutic process and relationship, so useful for professional
development rather than personal development and to demonstrate that
supervision needs to be a space where powerful feelings can be explored.
Despondency grew in some group members to the extent that there was thought of
giving up and leaving. Desperation was strong if a client was ambivalent or
missed sessions, affecting the counsellor’s ability to contain or reflect. An
unconscious defensive reaction of avoiding such pain was enacted, when one
client was wavering and was offered a ‘holiday’ free of charge, so the trainee
counsellor, experiencing a similar pain and difficulty in continuing while
having to pay fees, “was expressing some of his own conflicts with the training
organization through the patients’ material that he was presenting but also
that this conflict was affecting the manner in which he was responding to the
patient” (Thomas in Driver & Martin 2005 p.143), This intensified for me, a
sense of the importance of the supervisory task of containing but also of
distinguishing the anxieties of both the counsellors and the clients. “These
two sets of needs can overlap and conflate and generate defensive reactions
that impinge learning” (Thomas in Driver & Martin 2005 p.143). I was very
aware of a shifting focus from the triangle of
supervisor/supervisee/organisation to supervisor/supervisee/client.
After eighteen months, I think that something
productive has come out of this struggle, of a “receptive and creative
atmosphere” in the supervisory relationship (Thomas in Driver & Martin 2005
p.126), that this group are able to be individual in their different responses
and to be receptive to feedback and ideas in an open way that may take longer
for other trainees or even more experienced counsellors. Mollon comments that time
is needed, but that “the difference depends on the extent to which the
framework for learning has been built” (Mollon in Shipton 1997 p.30). In spite
of the long wait, perhaps it has been an advantage for a supervision group to
have a preparation time during which a “good-enough facilitating environment”
could develop (Thomas in Driver & Martin 2005 p.141).
REFERENCES
Driver
C. & Martin E.,Eds 2005 Supervision & the Analytic Attitude Whurr
Publications
Shipton,G.,Ed.1997
Supervision of Counselling &Psychotherapy Open University Press
Supervision & Training
Jackie
Gerrard[3]
When asked to write a few words for
the BAPPS membership, I started to think again about the struggles involved for
supervisors of those in training. One
issue constant in training is that of assessment – to hold in mind issues of
‘pass’ or ‘fail’: good enough or not
good enough.
I think this dual role that the
supervisor holds in many trainings – i.e. the Training Committee looking to the
supervisor as the principal assessor of the trainee, can indeed be not only
difficult but sometimes very burdensome and daunting. As Supervisor and continuously as Assessor,
this inevitably clouds the pure supervisory process and when a trainee is
marginal there is often a question of what the trainee is censoring, hiding,
distorting in the material presented in order to ‘get it right’ for the
Supervisor.
I would like to quote from a paper I
wrote on Supervision some years ago setting out the difficulties in what I
called ‘training supervision versus consultative supervision’. “Perhaps
a broad brush distinction……is that in the mind of the supervisee in assessment
(or training) supervision would be ‘What does the supervisor think of me?’ whereas in consultative supervision it might
be, ‘What does the supervisor think is happening between the patient and
myself’. (Gerrard 1998, p.40)
I work as a Supervisor in two
different settings in the training role.
Firstly supervising a group of 3 trainees on the Advanced Diploma in
Psychodynamic Counselling (WPF) and also offering individual supervision to
trainee psychotherapists seeing three times weekly patients.
In some ways criteria for assessment
are similar and I will set these out:
1)
Ability
to empathise, use sensitivity and tact.
2)
Ability
to understand and interpret unconscious processes in oneself & the patient.
a)
Ability
to recognise transference and find ways to interpret where appropriate.
b)
Ability
to distinguish between countertransference and unresolved personal
transference issues and make use
of countertransference where appropriate.
3)
Ability
to confront and not be afraid of aggression and hatred.
4)
Ability
to tolerate, understand and interpret and not be afraid of sexual and erotic
issues and feelings of love.
5)
Ability
to hold boundaries and respect the power of the analytic frame, including
time and money.
Of course, we as therapists &
supervisors, will inevitably fall short of these criteria from time to time. Nevertheless they need to be in
place when considering qualification of our supervisees.
One of my supervisees ‘enacts’ her
maternal countertransference – she changes sessions, prolongs sessions,
discloses personal data and is generally having difficulty in holding the
frame. She retreats to re-construction
as an escape from addressing the prevailing transference issues. Another supervisee is wooden & halting
& quite withholding in the approach to patients. Yet another is guarded, presenting little
but fragments of work & virtually nothing of what she herself says to the
patient in sessions. All supervisees
need help & encouragement as well as exploration of what goes wrong or what
gets missed, or where communication breaks down. If supervision cannot be as safe as possible
a place to explore for a trainee, the work to help a supervisee understand
their patient is somewhat doomed.
As Supervisor, one of the ways I try
to help with understanding is to offer an experience where clinical work can be
linked with theory (Parsons, 2000). In
other words, it is important to find this ‘third’, the thinking space within
the supervisory hour. I believe Nina
Coltart once said, “it does not matter much which theory one has in mind when
working with a patient, as long as there is a theory”, or something of this
kind. She was, no doubt, referring to
this third area or triangular space – one is reminded of Ron Britton’s paper –
‘stop that fucking thinking’ (Britton,
1989).
It is inevitable that I be viewed as
the Analytic Superego (Colman, 2006) as Supervisor to those in training. I find these days, after nearly 20 years of
supervisory experience that I have come closer to the view expressed by my own
Supervisor who, when asked if a certain candidate was ready to qualify
responded “How the fuck should I know, I’m just the Supervisor” and suggested
that the Training Committee make that decision !
I can see some merit in this. I think that whilst, inevitably, the
Supervisor’s report will carry the most clout, other feedback on trainees is
their written work, their seminar work, how they function in experiential
groups.
I have also been in the delicate
position of supervising a qualified psychotherapist who was the training
therapist for a patient in training. In
my opinion, the supervisee’s patient should not have qualified. The patient (trainee) could not at the time
work with the psychoanalytic process and was quite paranoid. His reported efforts in supervision were
artificially constructed and doctored to the requirements of the supervisor. The trainee was clever and well able to
produce a final paper that merited a pass.
Only the training therapist (and I suppose myself) knew the
difficulties. This leads me to pose the
question that goes further than the previous one – i.e. should the
pronouncement of readiness to qualify rest so heavily on the shoulders of the
supervisor? The second and more
controversial question is should we be re-considering involving the training
therapist when issues of qualification are at stake?
I know this is a most contentious
question, but I do think it is one well worth debating – to what extent is the
training therapy a ‘holy cow’ that must bear no intrusion whatsoever from the
training body? If this is so – why do
we continue to call it a ‘training therapy’ and those who practise it ‘training
therapists’?
Perhaps this question will inspire
further debate amongst us.
REFERENCES
Britton,
R.: (1989): The Missing Link, in The
Oedipus Complex Today. Karnac Books
Colman, W.:
(2006) The Analytic Superego, J.B.A.P.,
Vol. 44, no 2.
Gerrard, J.:
(1998) Supervision, its vicissitudes and issues of frequency, in Supervision
–
Psychoanalytic
and Jungian Perspectives, ed. Clarkson, Whurr Books.
Parsons, M.:
(2000) Refinding Theory in Clinical Practice in The Dove that Returns, The Dove
that Vanishes,
Parsons, Routledge.
The
Supervisor and the Super-Ego
Warren Colman[4]
In my recently published paper on The Analytic Super-Ego I have explored a
number of factors that foster a climate in psychoanalytic culture ‘wherein
analytic goals and methods are set up as an ideal standard against which the
practitioner is continually measuring themselves (and/or others) with a strong
flavour of moral injunction and admonishment toward deviations and
shortcomings’. These anxieties stem both
from the clinical situation where the therapist’s actual performance inevitably
falls short of their ego-ideal due to their inability to alleviate their
patients suffering and from the analytic organizational culture where such
anxieties become institutionalized through the idealisation of ‘rules’ and
procedures as an institutional defence against helplessness, vulnerability and
powerlessness. In this way, the
persecutory analytic super-ego becomes a powerful and pervasive feature of the
‘organisation in the mind’ of psychoanalysis.
This then promotes a defensive authoritarian conservatism in
psychoanalytic institutions and an inhibited, rule-bound and sometimes
judgemental approach to clinical practice (Colman, 2006).
In this article, I want to focus on
the way these anxieties are manifested in the supervisory situation. The supervisor plays a key role in either
exacerbating the trainee’s anxiety by becoming identified with the analytic
super-ego or modifying it by acting as a mediator who can assist the trainee to
become less restricted and fearful of persecutory judgement.
It is hardly surprising that the
supervisor is often seen by trainees as a threatening figure since, as the one
who ‘over-sees’, their similarity to the ‘above-I’ of the super-ego is readily
apparent. In the New Introductory Lecture, Freud introduces his audience to the
concept of the super-ego through the example of paranoid fantasies of being
observed:
Observation
of this sort is not yet the same thing as persecution, but it is not far from
it; it presupposes that people distrust them, and expect to catch them carrying
out forbidden actions for which they would be punished. (Freud, 1933: 59)
This seems to be very much the way
that supervisees, especially trainees, often feel about their supervisors. It can be hard for the supervisor to disabuse
trainees of such fantasies since not only do supervisors really have an
assessing and judging role but, unlike the personal analyst, they also do not
have the mandate to interpret and directly work with these feelings in the
supervisee.
Supervisors are often just as anxious
about their supervisory abilities as trainees are anxious about their
therapeutic ones. It can be a convenient defence to take refuge in
the trainee’s idealisation and identify with it, thus enacting the role of the
all-knowing, all powerful therapist in a way that they would never do with
their patients. Even if they are used to
living with uncertainty and not-knowing as a therapist, as a supervisor, they
may still feel that they are required to be ‘the one who knows’ and become anxious
to show that they have something to offer.
What easier way than to point out what the trainee has done ‘wrong’ and
how they would have done it better? The
supervisor may even feel that unless they can do this they have not proved
their worth as a supervisor. In this
way, they reinforce the trainee’s projection of them as a critical super-ego
figure.
Some supervisors do seem to feel that
it is their role to ‘instruct’ trainees in a particular way of working. Hewison (2003) recounts an example of a
supervisor who explicitly stated their requirement that the supervisee put her
own experience on one side, telling her that she could have her own thoughts
about it later in her professional development but that, for the moment,
‘you’re here to learn how to do it my way’.
Apart from making the supervisee feel inadequate, this approach is
almost bound to be unsuccessful since no interpretation is likely to be
effective if it does not carry the therapist’s personal conviction.
Casement describes the fear of failure
that this approach engenders in trainees:
Many
of us know of students who have felt the need to edit their clinical accounts
of sessions in order to leave out bits that a supervisor might disapprove of;
or who have written up a modified account of some sessions in order to appear
to a supervisor … to be interpreting as they are expected to. (Casement, 2005: 1145)
This approach is disastrous for the
supervision, of course, since it becomes impossible to work with the
therapist’s unconscious counter-transference enactments. It excludes the
unknown, the unexpected and the unconventional – in short, it excludes the
unconscious! It is not easy to foster
the open-minded curiosity that enables a therapist to review their responses
not as right or wrong but as evidence of the unconscious process at work; to do
so, the supervisor needs to make it clear that such questions as ‘why did you say that?’ are not accusations
of ‘error’ but an expression of their own evenly suspended interest in the
therapeutic process
Even when the supervisor is aware of
the danger of identifying with the analytic super-ego, they can still fall prey
to their supervisee’s projections, often enacting a frustrating and potentially
damaging vicious circle. The supervisee
who brings to supervision their own punitively judgemental super-ego
self-criticisms is likely to project this onto the supervisor and react
accordingly. They may be so anxious that
they are unable to present a coherent account of a session or become overly
defensive and self-justifying when anything is taken up. They may present stilted material due to
their own efforts to ‘do it right’; they
may be so preoccupied with what the supervisor thinks that their work does suffer and they fail to pick up the
feeling tone of the session. As a result, the supervisor forms a
negatively skewed view of their work and comes to believe that this is indeed
an incompetent therapist who is likely to fail.
Inevitably, this increases the projection and the anxiety and may actually
lead to failure. In some extreme cases,
this is appropriate since the trainee is so caught up in their own persecutory
internal world that they cannot hear anything that is said to them and so
become unable to learn. More often, though, the vicious circle can be undone
once the supervisor recognises their apparently objective judgement as a
counter-transferential identification with the trainee’s persecuting
super-ego. It then becomes possible to
help the trainee differentiate between real areas of their work that they need
to develop and their own self-flagellation for being unable to meet what they
take to be the idealised standards of the supervisor and of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy at large.
Since I believe that idealised rules,
procedures and standards are anathema to the free play of the therapist’s
individual creativity on which any successful therapy depends, I am loathe to
make any prescriptions of my own as to how supervisors might work to mitigate
the pressures of the analytic super-ego. In my own supervisory practice, I try to
foster a climate that eschews the notion of ‘mistakes’ so that the supervisee
feels free to share their own doubts and fears as well as the kind of
counter-transference responses that do not show them in a good light (e.g.
hoping that the patient will terminate the therapy or focusing on positive
feelings because the patient is usually so ‘negative’). To do this, I find it helpful to share
examples from my own clinical practice, especially those that illustrate that
being a training analyst does not provide immunisation against feelings of
helplessness, hopelessness, frustration and guilt. I also maintain more open boundaries than as
an analyst, exchanging a certain amount of personal information and even
sharing illustrations from my own life and/or analysis where it seems
particularly relevant. In this way I aim
to foster a collaborative atmosphere while maintaining my own supervisory
authority.
I know that there are ‘pitfalls’ to
this approach - that ‘the focus on the
psychic world of the particular patient can get lost’ or the supervision can be
‘[hijacked] by the supervisor’s unresolved conflicts or needs’ (Thomas,
2005). However, I would contend that
there are also pitfalls to maintaining strict analytic boundaries with
supervisees since this may foster a regressive transference that cannot be
analysed and lead to artificially attempting to deal with the
transference/counter-transference between supervisor and supervisee as if it is
always an aspect of the reflection or ‘parallel’ process. Here again, we must all work in the way that
is right for us and that expresses our own individuation as therapists and
persons. In this way, we may hope to
model for our trainees a truly living relation to the arduous work of
psychoanalysis in which the super-ego functions not as the moral
authoritarianism of ‘thou shalt not’ but more like a council of elders
consulted by ruler. Then, as Britton
puts it ‘the example of intrepid ancestors and the trust of respected colleagues
is a source of inner strength. (Britton, 2003: 128).
REFERENCES
Britton, R. (2003) Sex, Death and the Super-ego. Experiences in
Psychoanalysis.
Colman, W. (2006) The analytic super-ego. Jnl. Of the British Assn of Psychotherapists,
Vol. 44 (2), 99-114.
Casement, P. (2005) The emperor’s clothes: some serious problems
in psychoanalytic training. Int. Jnl. of
Psycho-anal. 86:4, 1143-1160.
Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures in
Psychoanalysis. S.E. Vol. 22, 3-184. Vintage.
Hewison, D. (2003) Review of ‘Learning from out mistakes: beyond
dogma in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy’ by Casement, P. (2002). Jnl. of
Analytical Psychology,Vol. 48 :5, 729–730.
Thomas, M. (2005)
Through the looking glass: creativity in supervision.
In Supervision and the Analytic
Attitude, ed. C. Driver & E. Martin.
New Members
Pasty Faure 223
b
patsy.faure@virgin.net [ BACP ]
Stephen
Ingham 5 Crag
View Cononley Keighley W YORKS BD20 8JU
[ BACP
01535 634857
Liz
Omand
liz@omand1.demon.co.uk [ BPC ]
Ruth
Weeden 60
High Beech Road Loughton
weeden@onetel.com [ UKCP
BACP ]
Spring Conference-
Breaking the Spell
Joy Schaverein Sat
19th May
This conference allows us to explore
the proposition that the psychotherapist may come to supervision in a condition
akin to unconscious enchantment. This is
not a romantic state but, rather, a very real and substantial embodiment of a
psychological shadow element of the therapeutic relationship. This is most evident when the erotic
transference takes hold, or alternatively when it is notably absent, then
Super-Vision is required. It is as if
the therapist is spellbound and is in need of the vision of an-other – a
witness – to facilitate a conscious attitude and so break the spell of this countertransference
enchantment.
Participants are encouraged to bring
examples from their own experiences - a lively exchange of ideas is envisaged! You
may also wish to glance at Joy’s chapter ‘Supervising the erotic transference
& countertransference’ in her new book to stimulate thinking prior to the
conference.
Joy Schaverien PhD is a
Professional Member of the Society of Analytical Psychology (
GENDER, COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
AND THE EROTIC TRANSFERENCE
Perspectives from Analytical Psychology and Psychoanalysis
Edited
by JOY SCHAVERIEN
Gender, Countertransference
and the Erotic Transference offers new insights into working with
complex transference and
countertransference phenomena. Including views from a wide spectrum of
theoretical backgrounds, it makes a unique contribution to discourse on the
themes of gender, sexuality and the erotic transference.
The contributors are highly
experienced clinicians with international reputations as theorists in the
fields of analytical
psychology, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Illustrated with
closely observed clinical
examples and detailed theoretical discussion, innovations in technique are
introduced on themes including developmental mourning, female perversion, the
meaning and purpose of the erotic transference, the dying patient, lesbian
homoerotic transference and supervision of the erotic transference.
Countertransference is vividly explored in chapters on sexual difference, the
therapist’s body and the challenging topic of perversion in the analyst. The
book is divided into four sections:
• gender and the erotic
transference
• the erotic transference
and the symbolic function
• women working with women
• historical perspectives on
women working with men.
Gender, Countertransference
and the Erotic Transference extends existing theory, highlighting the symbolic nature of the
transference/countertransference dynamic. It will be compelling reading for
experienced clinicians, students and trainees in the fields of psychoanalysis,
analytical psychology and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as counselling,
the arts therapies and social work.
Contents: Part I: Men Who Leave Too Soon. Schaverien, Introduction.
Schaverien, Men Who Leave Too Soon: Further Reflections on
the Erotic Transference and Countertransference. Schaverien, Erotic Transference, Countertransference and Individuation at
the End of Life. Schaverien, Supervising the Erotic Transference and
Countertransference. Part II: The Erotic Transference and the Symbolic Function. Schaverien, Introduction. Springer, Paying Homage to the Power of Love: Exceeding the Bounds of
Professional Practice.
in Male Patients with Female
Analysts.
November 2006: 296pp.
Hb: 1-58391-763-2 /
978-1-58391-763-3 £50.00 / $90.00
Pb: 1-58391-764-0 /
978-1-58391-764-0: £19.99 / $35.95
Published by Routledge
SUPERVISORS’ CONFERENCE BREAKING THE SPELL : COUNTERTRANSFERENCE ENCHANTMENT AND
THE EROTIC TRANSFERENCE IN SUPERVISION JOY SCHAVERIEN (Registration 9.45) TICKETS £70 Cheques to:
BAPPS Apply to:
Carolyn Couchman,
THE TAVISTOCK CENTRE
FREE
There is no such thing as a free lunch but the next best thing is .. a potential
free place at the Spring Conference.
That is …. ‘Free’ to someone will to contribute 500-750 words giving an
appreciation of the conference including their personal reactions. Please contact Annie Power.
BAPPS WEST
Report
We are
currently recruiting for the second intake to the STPN Supervision Training in
the South West. This involves 10 days of seminars in
area. If you are recommending supervision training to any of your
supervisees do encourage them to contact Ann Bowes, if relevant, on 0117
9735844 or email ann@bowesuk.co.uk.'
APP Section
Research Committee
There is a great deal of
psychoanalytic research around. However it has never been
collated. A 'textbase' owned by the Section, not UKCP, has been
commissioned to garner these riches. It is intended to be inclusive
of all psychoanalytic research so that such as the NHS can cease to say there
is no research evidence for psychoanalytic practice.
Initially only Section Registrants
will be able to access it as part of 'member benefits'. There will
be detailed step by step instructions how and what to place on this research
collation software, and the nature of the consent required. (NB we
do not take any copyrights etc).
Until we have trialed this software we will only collect abstracts,using a free
text search programme. Later we will invite the inclusion of papers
and explore the inclusion of non section Registrants. There will be
a facility to include other organisations purchasing access at a later
stage. Confidentiality will not be an issue for dissertations, ie
MA's and PhD's, as they are already in the public domain. Safeguards
will need to be introduced for other
research
papers.
The great need at the present time is to collect psychoanalytic research papers
so that the profile of psychoanalytic work is raised – whatever the registering
body. We hope for a broad spectrum co-operative approach with
especial emphasis on qualitative studies. A letter will
come around later this year inviting participation which means at present
putting your dissertation abstracts on the website. Please support
this enterprise. We also plan to hold workshops on turning theses
into papers for publications. If we do not raise the profile of
psychoanalytic work no-one else will. In addition if you have
research on supervision areas they are also crucial. As some of you
will doubtless note I gave up one job for an even tougher one – inaugural chair
of this committee.
Ann Bowes
Report from UKCP Delegates to the
2007 UKCP Conference & AGM
The main issues of concern coming from
the Conference floor were – how to enfranchise
registrants, whether the HPC will be our registering body and what will be the
role of the UKCP and the Independent Complaints Organisation, once we are state
registered, and this is still very unclear. Indeed, it would seem that once we
are state registered, any complaints would come under whichever body is
overseeing us, in which case the Independent Complaints Organisation would
become redundant altogether.
The main areas of concern from the
outgoing chair were that the DOH and NICE
believe that all therapists working under Individual Access to
Psychological Therapies must have training in CBT. And whilst the Government White Paper sees 3
professions coming under one umbrella: psychologists, counsellors,
psychotherapists, the BACP are pressing that counselling and psychotherapy are
the same – “psychological therapist is generic”. The UKCP view is that as well as communality
there is differentiation between psychological therapies in breadth and depth.
With regard to the role of the
Standards Board and re-registration (or re-validation), the plan seems to be
that regular supervision for all registrants will no longer be a choice. BUT
there are no plans prior to statutory regulation next year to make supervision
mandatory. Registrants will have 3 yearly validation and the plan is to have an
annual review of CPD including supervision by the Registration Board. It may well be that within a year or so,
organizational members and registrants will become direct members which would
change the voting structure again. The
possible cost per registrant to have a fully functioning UKCP would be £600
p.a.
There was lack of clarity about
whether the UKCP is a body for the protection of the public or for the
protection of professionals. As the
registering Council, be it the HPC or a.n.other, will be protecting the public,
then we would hope that UKCP will be a body for professionals, providing the
same kind of services that the BMA does for Doctors. However, UKCP considers
that it can only hold the regulatory function since its Articles’ primary
purpose is for the public. At present
the CEO of the ICO considers this body to be separate from UKCP because its
tribunals are independent. Much doubt was expressed from the floor because
financially the ICO is dependent upon UKCP. In the meantime the ICO is on hold
until November (following the frantic mandatory demand to sign up in January) &
until then the nine codes (which are on the ICO website) remain in force whilst
the new consultation process is taking place.
The significance of all of this for
BAPPS:
We will not have voting rights as an
organisation once registration is direct.
We have been turned down for
Institutional Membership & although it looks as though, being a Listing
Organisation, we are full members of UKCP there has been very strong resistance
to a BAPPS rep being able to sit on any executive committee or the Board of
Trustees.
The complications that occur as BAPPS
is strongly connected to the A3P (the new acronym) section and not relevant for
the whole of the UKCP, are manifold. The
only voice we have is in the APPP section, or college. The help we could provide in supporting
training standards and CPD in terms of supervision is apparent to us and
hopefully to the new Chair of the Section who has recently become a BAPPS
member. We would very much like to put
it to the Section that we become an accrediting organisation for the Section,
but it is debatable as to whether there is any enthusiasm or will from the
Section membership to embrace the idea of accreditation.
We heard from the Standards Board that
the Supervision Conference was a great success & a further supervision
consultative body has been formed to which BAPPS will send a delegate.
Geri
Dogmetchi and Penny Wise
