PSYCHOANALYTIC SUPERVISION AS A HUMAN RHIZOME

Abstract

This article discusses supervision in psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a process that integrates personal analysis, theoretical training, and the elaboration of the feelings, emotions, and thoughts that patients evoke in the therapist-in-training. Drawing from work with a colleague beginning her clinical practice, it explores how supervision creates the necessary conditions for the practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
A second line of reflection focuses on the transmission of psychoanalysis and examines, through clinical material, the role of theory in tension with the therapist’s way of being in the encounter with patients. In agreement with authors who argue that the training of the analyst is more experiential than cognitive, it is proposed that the central goal of supervision is the development of the supervisee’s internal resources.