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The quality of our work as child and adolescent psychotherapists is only made possible by the background presence of a third person. The supervisor creates a triangular space that facilitates another perspective potentially reducing the enmeshment of the therapist–patient dyad. When Zinkin (1995) wrote of supervision as the ‘impossible
profession’, he was referring to the difficulty firstly of the clinician communicating the essence of therapy and secondly for a supervisor to grasp the meaning of this work which involves a third person in another place. Addressing this complexity is part of the challenge of inner world work. Ongoing supervision is therefore an essential part of good clinical practice and the central source of continued professional development (Association of Child Psychotherapists, 2015). During my training I had many wise supervisors who gave me invaluable lessons in how to learn from the patient. These internalised supervisors continue to be rich sources of insight and learning.
The editor of this book is an eminent American psychoanalyst who has written inter alia about object relations theory. The book is a collection of chapters from around the world which aim to ‘… approach task, boundary, focus, and interaction in supervision from multiple vertices – research, analytic sensibility, group process, bodily and artistic expression, and individual teaching and learning in clinical supervision’ (p. xvi).
The first piece is an introductory essay by Imre Szecsödy who has often researched the process of supervision. He writes,
The continuous maintenance of boundaries around the task of supervision, keeping an equidistant position, encouraging the trainees to organise the information, and focusing on the patient-therapist/supervisee-supervisor relationship constitutes a mutative learning situation that facilitates learning, irrespective of the type of learning problems’ (p. 10).
He usefully describes three aspects to supervision. The stationary aspect