Disruptions and Working Through in the Supervisory Process16

Joan Sarnat (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California) introduced the panel, setting the stage for vignettes illustrating working through disruptions in supervision. Sarnat suggested that the accepted importance of working through disruptions in the psychoanalytic relationship must be extended to working through disruptions in the supervisory relationship as well. She introduced an intersubjective model of supervision, emphasizing that both the supervisor's and analyst's psychologies need to be taken into account along with the patient's.

Sarnat, Ungar and Berman then presented vignettes of supervisory situations. Sarnat's vignette showed how in her supervision of an analytic candidate she and the candidate participated in co-creating a bastion, to protect themselves against unmanageable feelings of worthlessness and incompetence. Defenses against the interlocking vulnerabilities of patient, analyst and supervisor created a dead space where creative psychic work was impossible. Sarnat took the supervisory impasse to her peer consultation group. The group provided needed emotional containment, and as a result both the supervision and the analysis came back to life. Virginia Ungar's (Buenos Aires Psychoanalytical Association) vignettes were a way of introducing her point of view, founded on a contemporary Kleinian thinking; that is, that there are subtle and unavoidable elements within supervision that cause disruption, particularly the unique relationship that is established between a particular patient, analyst and supervisor. She views the counter-transferences of all participants as key to understanding this phenomenon. Emanuel Berman's (Israeli Psychoanalytical Society) vignette (read by Sarnat) illustrated the impact that differences in theoretical perspectives of supervisors within a psychoanalytic institute, and their divergent views regarding the way analysis should be conducted, can have on the candidate and on the supervised analysis. He emphasized th