At 2:30 in the morning, between the psychic deadness and the institutional cruelty of bad supervisors, lives a truth nobody in clinical training wants to admit: the way you are taught shapes what you become. Here, we refuse to let that pass unremarked.
This newsletter is not written to you at 4:30 in the morning but at 2:30 in the night.
*Not my proudest moment*
But… there’s something about the deadness of the night that allows you to touch your own psychic deadness- or what Eigen illustrates as, “pockets of deadness that are relatively constant”.
*……… buffering*
Basically, when sleep has been ruptured, what would an analyst do without dreams? They turn towards the prepossessing deadness.
I reckon I’ve been sitting on this piece for far too long- weeks in writing, years in mind, for it would crystalise in my mind & yours, the scathing impact of an unkind, holier-than-thou clinical supervisor– a part object we (need to) internalize as a marker of our work.
I mean it doesn’t take a genius to agree that bad supervisors can deeply damage you individually & professionally; it is no surprise that many professionals have had an experience of being bullied (not using this word lightly) by their supervisors.
So yes, if history is any evidence, bad supervisors can leave an imprint of low self-worth, & a sticky imposter syndrome that freezes us & our praxis in our student era.
They tend to make you withdraw your curiosity, enact your ambiguity, fear your despair- all pieces that come together to form the therapist self. In totality, you lobotomise the health of an early career therapist & leave them hollowed out like an echo chamber of the internalised inept supervisor.
*Fasten your seat-belts, it gets only more dramatic*
So let me put this straight… I’m an ardent supporter of supervision, and coffee. It’s unsettling to assume that a therapy practice can rely on the relational (decaffeinated) unconscious of one person in a room full of affect, projections & transferences.
Or as Ogden would ascertain my point (pfff, I wish)- “the supervisee creates a ”fiction” about the patient and about the therapeutic relationship, a fiction that unconsciously selects material in keeping with the supervisee’s own unconscious needs, anxieties, desires in the moment”.
So yeah, while this is just one of the many complex ways in which the therapist’s & patient’s unconscious collude, it is safe to pin that “if we fail to take into account our own conflictual responses, we risk enacting that which we should be interpreting” (Irma Pick, 1985).
And yet, as necessary as it is, supervision is also a deeply evocative & vulnerable space. It takes the therapist bringing in their authentic self, their helplessness & the unavoidable errors for scrutiny & support. But what’s (sadly) left unrecognised is that supervision is largely relying on the therapist’s intuitiveness to gauge the mis-attunement, their willingness to learn & the courage to showcase the incomplete works.
Sooo, basically they are kind of doing an amazing job by just showing up with all their truths & trysts. And then all it takes is a Karen-like supervisor with their narcissistic impunity, messed-up politics & gaslighting skills to convert the process of honing into horror. And just like that, something that had the potential to be pivotal & profound gets foreclosed.
How do such oppressive people become therapists, you may ask… well, I believe this question is more satisfying & empowering than the answer.
The concern, however, is not so much the systemic existence of such authority figures; the concern is the withstanding impact they have on younger therapists- either normalising the toxicity of the process or gatekeeping the process altogether. Twist the power of knowledge & button it with the language of analysis & you have the recipe for keeping the other confused about their own subjective experience- and then, leave it to the higher-ups to do this job impeccably!
Alas, you might know of at least one supervisor who has had a detrimental impact on someone, leaving them not angry, but miserable. The misery is in not being able to imagine there is another way of knowing, that there is a possibility of relatedness without the hierarchy, that this mean remark is not a me problem but a you problem.
No, I’m not advocating canoodling, Karen!
I mean sure supervisees need to be nudged & questioned, & well, also be made to remove their unconscious floaties that are keeping them afloat without swimming (that’s fun!), but what’s at the centre is, using McWilliams words, “when respect is maximised and shame minimised, most professionals open themselves eagerly to learning”, especially in a cultural landscape like ours where marginalisation & humiliation has been a historical weapon of oppression.
So, am I saying supervisors need to be of a certain temperament & personality? No.
Am I saying they need to be ‘sweet’ & ‘loving’? ew No…!
I’m just asserting the need for an analytic attitude- a crafted stance of thinking, listening & engaging that is facilitative of the analytical process– within the supervisory dyad.
Now, not to sound holier-than-thou myself… I’m inclined to turn to the endless archive of the ideal supervisory process. But, our favourites return to our rescue in brief-
Nancy McWilliams– In one of the discussion groups with Nancy & her therapisty blue cardigan, she spoke of the supervision process being a space to bring out “love, work and play”. For her, the supervisee needs to be met with an atmosphere of solidarity and sameness to be able to unravel the undermining moments of the therapy process. How brilliant is that in those 2 hours, she never used words like ‘teach’ or ‘wrong’, instead she used ‘vitality’ & ‘forgiveness’. Perhaps, what it assembles, for me, is the permission that there exist other ways of being and becoming a supervisor, that are built on the respect for both- communality and individuality.
Ogden & Eigen– What an opportunity to bring these two together in thought!
Thomas Ogden in On Psychoanalytic Supervision & Michael Eigen in Being Too Good urges us to drop the act of righteousness & enter a state of “guided dreaming”- to do the conscious & unconscious work of emotional attunement. They speak of a parallel process that, if enabled, mimics the therapeutic experiences onto the supervisory dyad. I mean, how ill-placed one’s psychoanalysis has to be to speak of transferential material from an arm’s length without having to look at the spillovers in the supervisory process.
| So, what I’m bringing up, as someone who has survived a detrimental supervision, and cherished the thoughtful ones, that supervision process tends to be a learning experience more extraordinary & richer than the training process itself… don’t let be anything otherwise! |
| P.S. Tip: If you see a bad supervisor, turn around & run. P.P.S. A shoutout to my supervisees who’re doing an amazing job, on most days. |
