A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Supervision in Field Education: Reflective and Containment Space for Supervision Interns

This paper describes two supervision groups of supervisor-interns undergoing training as supervisors, based on psychoanalytic supervisory principles, within the academic setting of a school of social work. The author focuses on the challenge of creating reflective and containment space, given the importance of such space for the supervisor-interns' learning and development in the context of the social construction of practice. Participants' descriptions, at their weekly supervision group meetings, of the supervisory process, are combined with vignettes and narratives of their experiences as supervisor-interns. Those experiences, under the author's tutelage as supervision group leader, were analysed through mirroring and interpreting the unconscious conflicts of a presented patient, the supervisee—patient relationship, or the process in the supervisory situation itself through the stimulus of the unconscious of group members manifesting in the verbalization of ideas. The supervision groups enabled associative thinking and dreaming as participants processed unconscious experiences, unconscious identifications, and communications derived from clinical materials. The relevance of these processes to teaching and learning supervision is discussed, and their usefulness for conceptualizing professional growth and creativity is demonstrated.