Unconscious Processes in Supervision

Dear Editor

The recent article ‘Some Thoughts on Supervision’ in the BJP (26(2): 228-41, May 2010) by Darian Leader and its focus on the importance of considering the impact of the unconscious on supervisory processes is a welcome addition to the literature on supervision. However, I am concerned about the misunderstanding and misrepresentation that Leader conveys on page 228 of his article. He rightly criticizes the moves within the profession towards supervision being seen as just transmitting knowledge and skills in which, he maintains, the variables of transference and countertransference are more or less absent and ‘supervision is understood as a knowledge-based endeavor similar to those common in non-analytic fields such as business consultancy and marketing where an expert imparts methods and skills for a fee’ (p. 229). He also criticizes the move towards pedagogic and didactic approaches to supervision and with this I also agree. He also considers the UKCP Generic Guidelines (May 2009) but I personally bowed out of this process in 2006, as trying to find such guidelines to cover all modalities inevitably led to generalizations in which the specific dynamics of process, especially in relation to unconscious processes, seemed to become marginalized.

Therefore I am surprised to find the book Supervision and the Analytic Attitude (Driver & Martin, 2005) cited in relation to this. This book takes as its fundamental remit the significance and importance of understanding and working with unconscious processes in supervision. The word education is used three times but only in relation to other authors; the word coaching is not used at all in the book and the word ‘monitoring’ is only used three times, twice in relation to meta-cognitive monitoring and its reference source and once in relation to ‘monitoring countertransference’ (Driver & Martin, 2005, p. 140). Maybe another term could be used but interestingly I think this is what Leader is talking about when he refer