From Witness to With-Ness: Supervising in Ukraine

Sitting on the sofa in my office on a random, cold, Monday afternoon, I flip open my screen. Seventeen little squares with seventeen little faces. Who are you? I wonder. Where are you? Are you okay? Are you safe?

We settle into our three hour zoom meeting – them presenting, me supervising, reflecting, all of us commenting, trying to mold unwieldy clinical narratives into some logical shape, trying through barriers of disparate language, culture, and physical distance to make sense of them.

These therapists, living and working in Ukraine, have decided to do something wild and quixotic – to enter a training program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the midst of the chaos of war, in the midst of the destruction of their culture, their way of life. In the midst of the inhumane, they have chosen to invest in humanity, in connection, in the future: in the wish for something more.

And yet.

There seems something fundamentally absurd about this endeavor, about in-depth psychoanalysis in a time of crisis management.

And another absurdity. This one mine alone:

Here I sit in my New York office. Comfy, well-fed, the illusion of safety intact, at least for this next while. The disjunction between their world and my own hits like a punch to the gut. Every clinical presentation includes the words “full invasion;” there are traumas here I know not of experiences far away. As our discussions go on, I am reminded, again and again, of the tenderness of human life, its fragilities, its precariousness.

The Ukrainian facilitator stops our session. The news agency just sent out a warning – there are bombs dropping. “If anyone is unsafe, or if anyone feels unsafe, you can leave this meeting,” she says. “Please leave this meeting.” No one does. I do not know how we carry on from here. But we do – Freud, Kohut, Bion, Mitchell – somehow our conversation goes on.

As our meetings continue, I notice something strange – there is something impersonal, something tense in the field,