Proposal for a Common Language, Educationally-Informed Model of Psychoanalytic Supervision

Psychoanalytic supervision, as presented here, is considered to be a formative, developmental learning experience that is preeminently educational in its mission, process, and product. Such an educational experience, where various types of personal and professional learning occur, would seem ideally informed by, guided by, and grounded in educational theory and educational psychology. Yet psychoanalytic supervision has, with notable international exceptions (e.g., Gordan, 1997; Szecsödy, 1997), generally lacked for any such grounding and has primarily appeared to traditionally rely upon psychoanalytic conceptions of personality and treatment to direct supervision practice. Although that conceptual reliance is necessary, it is not a sufficient base for the conduct of psychoanalytic supervision. Drawing on work from the fields of learning, educational psychology, and teacher education, a tri-phasic, common-language structure—learning alliance (LA) building and maintenance, learning interventions (LI), and learning/relearning (LR)—for thinking about and guiding psychoanalytic supervision conceptualization and practice is presented and considered. The supervisory process is envisioned as involving both new learning and relearning (corrective cognitive, corrective affective, and corrective behavioral experiences), each stage is linked predominantly with a particular learning domain and specific type of learning, and common features and factors of trans-theoretical significance across stages are identified. The LA/LI/LR model involves continued supervisee cycling and recycling through the feel-think-do (or some variation) of the perspective’s three stages; the LA building and maintenance stage, however, is seen as being the conceptualization’s foundation and touchstone. This learning-based view provides a useful structure for thinking about psychoanalytic supervision within a more unified, educationally-informed framework.