You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Good supervision is an excellent example of the alchemical tincture: a little bit goes a long way. It deeply affects a therapist who in turn affects a multitude of patients. Langs, in his book Doing Supervision and Being Supervised, provides clear guidelines which, if followed, add to the potency of this potential pharmikon. Drawing on extensive experience with his communicative method Langs brings into tight focus the importance of the supervisory frame and use of clinical validation of interventions to the process of supervision. He quite persuasively argues that in spite of supervision being the backbone of any psychotherapeutic training system it is the one area where many clinicians tend to be the most lax. He states, ‘Teach as you were taught and were analysed is the credo—a simple, down-to-earth approach that lacks guiding discipline or structure’ (p. 16).
Langs first reviews his interactional communicative model based on the two systems of the emotion-processing mind: the conscious system which he finds is more survival-related, responsive to triggers which are consciously identifiable, and relatively insensitive to subtle impingements of boundaries and frame; and, the unconscious system which is highly sensitive to ground rule and frame issues and, secondarily, to levels of meaning on the perceived helpfulness or failings of caretaking figures, such as therapists and supervisors. It is listening and responding to the reactions of this latter system, ‘the deep unconscious wisdom subsystem’, that is the hallmark of the communicative approach.
These communications appear as encoded stories, metaphorical comments and elaborations, produced by the patient, or supervisee in the case of supervision, which reference the psyche's adaptive response to boundary violations and impingements. The task of the therapist/supervisor is to respond to these communications by interpreting them (understanding them in the adaptive context from which they arise) to the patient/super