Reflective Practices in Supervision

REFLECTIVE PRACTICES IN SUPERVISION

With Professor Edward Watkins & Dr Joan E Sarnat

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Professor Edward Watkins

Reflections on Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Supervision in Three Parts:

How Supervision Works, Actualizing the Cultural Third, and the Problem of Parallel Process

This three-part presentation will accordingly take up three questions: 1) how does psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision work?; 2) what is the place of multicultural orientation and the cultural third in supervision?; and 3) could parallel process be nothing more than a process of supervisory patient-izing, force fits, and wild analysis? In addressing Question 1, he will (a) present a host of critical commonalities that are seemingly shared by all psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision perspectives and (b) propose a theoretical model --- the Contextual Psychoanalytic Supervision Relationship Model (CPSRM) --- that anchors and grounds those very commonalities; the CPSRM provides a way of considering “how” and “why” our supervision works and, conversely, the “how” and “why” of its not working. In addressing Question 2, he will (a) describe and explain what is meant by multicultural orientation (MCO) and the Cultural Third and (b) show their relevance for psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision practice; MCO and the Cultural Third are also presented as supremely significant in making psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision work and work well. In addressing Question 3, he will take a contrarian view about parallel process, inviting you to accompany him in (a) challenging and questioning supervision’s “signature phenomenon” and (b) reinterpreting some of our most hallowed parallel process examples via an alternative hypothesis perspective; his objective here is not to “take down” parallel process but to place it in a “broader historical perspective” and for us to think together about this oh so critical construct within that broader contextualized perspective.

Biography: C. Edward Watkins, Jr., Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas. He is editor of the Handbook of Psychotherapy Supervision (1997), co-editor (with Derek Milne) of the Wiley International Handbook of Clinical Supervision (2014), and co-author (with Loredana-Ileana Vîșcu) of A Guide to Clinical Supervision: The Supervision Pyramid (2021). His psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision publications have appeared in such journals as Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, The Psychoanalytic Review, and International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He is a Fellow of Divisions 29 (Psychotherapy) and 17 (Counseling Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.

Dr Joan E Sarnat

Working with Enactment in the Supervisory Relationship:

A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach

This two-hour presentation offers participants an opportunity to bring their psychoanalytic minds to bear in reflecting upon a supervisory relationship. After Dr. Sarnat introduces herself and describes how she came to develop a “relational” approach to psychoanalytic supervision, we will view Dr. Sarnat’s video of a 45-minute supervision session. As we attend to what is going on unconsciously in the supervisory session, we will identify an enactment and the supervisor’s attempt to work with it. We will tease apart two possible sources of this supervisory enactment: first, the replication in the supervisory relationship of a problem in the clinical relationship, a so-called “parallel process;” and, second, an unidentified problem in the supervisory relationship itself. We will observe how a convergence of unprocessed material in the two relationships potentiates the enactment. Finally, we will consider how a supervisor’s willingness to pay attention to unconscious process in the supervisory relationship, including the supervisor’s own unconscious participation, enhances teaching and learning.

Biography: Joan E. Sarnat, Ph.D., ABPP is a personal and supervising analyst and member of the Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC).  Dr. Sarnat has been writing and teaching about psychoanalytic supervision since 1993.  In addition to 13 papers on supervision, she has published two books: Supervision Essentials for Psychodynamic Psychotherapies, which is accompanied by a DVD of Dr. Sarnat conducting a supervisory session (American Psychological Association, 2016); and, with Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, The Supervisory Relationship (Guilford Press, 2001). Dr. Sarnat is in clinical and supervisory practice in Berkeley, California.