Impasses and Failures in Analysis

Now seven years into its work, our Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE) Study Group on Impasses and Failures in Analysis has stayed true to its original purpose and yet has evolved in a direction that we could not have predicted. [See “Impasses and Failures in Analysis,” TAP 45/2, page 25.] From its early discussions of impasses and failures in both analysis and supervision, the group has recently narrowed its focus to impasses in supervision, with a special interest in those supervisory impasses in which the difficulties can be seen to involve not only patient, analyst, and supervisor, but also contributions from the institutional setting in which the treatment and the supervision are taking place.

A brief review of the evolution of our COPE group will provide a contextual frame for our current focus and thinking. Initially the group worked in conjunction with an APsaA discussion group of the same title, which we initiated alongside of the COPE study group. Members of the COPE group were encouraged to attend the Thursday discussion group, and at our Friday COPE meetings we would spend time further discussing the case presented the previous day. We also heard and discussed, in our smaller COPE group, cases of clinical and supervisory impasses presented by members of the COPE group. In these early discussions, we were (and still are) particularly interested in studying the impact of impasses on candidates and recent graduates and in helping them better understand and integrate those experiences.

In the Thursday discussion group, the focus was on the patient-analyst impasse, but what frequently emerged in the cases we heard was an analyst-supervisor difficulty that seemed to be contributing to the impasse. This was surprising both to the presenter and initially to us in the COPE study group. In these cases, the problematic aspects of the supervision had been insufficiently noted, understood, or dealt with. For understandable reasons of privacy, the presenters were often reticent to delve too deeply into supervisory difficulties in the larger open discussion group; therefore further discussions with the presenter were conducted privately at our Friday COPE group meeting. These meetings resulted in a deepening of our appreciation of the kinds of supervisory difficulties involved in impasses and failures and raised many questions for further exploration.

…the group has recently narrowed its focus to impasses in supervision, with a special interest in those supervisory impasses in which the difficulties can be seen to involve not only patient, analyst, and supervisor, but also contributions from the institutional setting…

Supervisory Triad Becomes a Quartet

Over time, we became increasingly interested in the role of the supervision and of supervisory impasse in the cases of analytic impasse and failure that we were hearing. In studying additional material presented in the privacy of the COPE group, we further began to notice that the difficulties we were hearing often went beyond the supervision itself to involve problems in the larger analytic community. These have involved such circumstances as sexual and nonsexual boundary violations, and competition and power struggles between supervisors or between supervisor and analyst. While the literature makes frequent reference to the supervisory triad of patient, analyst, and supervisor, our work most recently has focused on a “supervisory quartet” in which considerations of institutional politics and/or boundary violations constitute an important dimension. In these cases, the role of each component of the quartet cannot be adequately understood without considering the role of each additional component.

Of particular interest to us has been the observation that it was only in the course of further small group discussions that the extent to which the institutional or community

context was contributing to the supervisory impasse became clear. We hope, and have certainly come to believe, that the experience of telling, thinking about, and, in some instances, writing about their experiences has served a healing function for our presenter colleagues. In addition, we have realized that these discussions have broadened our own understanding of the complexity and multiple contributing factors in situations of clinical impasses. This understanding is now something that we bring to our discussions in the Thursday open discussion group.

We are currently collecting a series of anonymously written accounts of supervisory impasses that colleagues have presented to our COPE study group over the past several years. We expect these to be published along with framing chapters and discussions that we and others in the study group will contribute. This is a work in progress, and our group continues to meet with colleagues who are willing to share their experiences with us and help us further develop and refine our ideas.

At this point in our history, the COPE group is still going strong. Membership has been stable, except for one move to inactive status (Lucy LaFarge) and one addition to the group (Ann Radovsky). We plan to spend the next several meetings hearing and collecting further information on supervisory impasses, and in preparing our written collection and commentaries. We are grateful to colleagues who have presented their work and their experiences to us in both the Thursday and the Friday groups, some of whom will be writing chapters anonymously for our collection. We are glad to hear from colleagues who are interested in presenting in either setting.