Candidates' Anxiety in Supervision: A Discussion

Authentic Voices in Supervision

“…Kaufman (2006) suggests that the safer supervisees feel in their supervisory relationships, the more openly they will express their authentic selves in their supervisory discourse. Both participants in the supervisory space attain a feeling of safety if they succeed in developing consistent, repairable, stable, and trustworthy relationships within clear and stable boundaries and a solid working alliance (Hanoch, 2006).…”

“…When applying these insights to supervision, we can reasonably assume that supervisees’ rhetorical devices are also unconsciously motivated because, similarly to patients, supervisees do not deliberately intend to hide or blur their vulnerabilities and needs. On the contrary, they usually acknowledge that supervision ‘is founded upon supervisee exposure, disclosure, reflection, and responsiveness’ (Watkins, 2014, p. 184) despite shame and anxiety that might be aroused by these acts (Kaufman, 2006). Therefore, to discover the supervisees’ authentic voices, often masked by unconscious rhetorical devices, supervisors can adopt the poetic stance, which intersects the worlds of the implicit and the explicit (Anderson, 2016) and worlds of the immediate lived experience and the explicit content (Weisel‐Barth, 2016).…”

“…Therefore, transferential manifestations are likely to mask the supervisees' authentic voices, thereby disrupting both supervisor's and supervisee's efforts to understand the implicit intersubjective realities of the supervised therapies. Kaufman (2006) suggests that the safer supervisees feel in their supervisory relationships, the more openly they will express their authentic selves in their supervisory discourse. Both participants in the supervisory space attain a feeling of safety if they succeed in developing consistent, repairable, stable, and trustworthy relationships within clear and stable boundaries and a solid working alliance (Hanoch, 2006).…”

The use of a concept: Projective identification and its theoretical use in supervision.

“…Some things are beyond words and can only be reached through countertransference (Joseph, 1985). Projective identification is perhaps an emancipating concept for supervisees because it leads them, through their own subjective responses, to discover more about themselves and, in the process, to find their own voice (Kaufman, 2006). In this way, the concept is potentially a vehicle for better understanding themselves and their patients rather than a discrete concept in and of itself.…”

“…The literature on working with countertransference in supervision is generally preoccupied with the question of whether or not the supervisor should address countertransference or whether this is beyond the bounds of the supervisory relationship. Commonly referred to as the “teach-treat” debate (Kaufman, 2006; Sarnat, 1992), it has tackled the important issue of whether or not to address countertransference in supervision. However, in the process, the two debates around the nature of countertransference and the proper place for the analysis of countertransference (supervision or analysis) seem to have followed largely separate paths.…”