title: The patient's material as an aid to the disciplined working through of the countertransference and supervision.
abstract: The author argues that the patient's largely unconscious observations of the analyst's functioning are, at times, communicated in the patient's material and that this can impart a sense of clinical relevance to the countertransference. The concept of 'understanding work' is used to provide a psychoanalytical model of this phenomenon. This is illustrated in a clinical case and it is argued that a selective consideration of the patient's material can provide a proper discipline which steers the analyst between the twin dangers of megalomania, on the one hand, and involvement in a symmetrical, self-disclosing relationship, on the other. The author then applies these ideas to supervision and uses them to distinguish psychoanalytic supervision from a practice that also derives from an intersubjective paradigm but which, to the author's mind, is not distinct enough from personal analysis.
authors.affiliation: sedlak@blueyonder.co.uk
authors.forename: Vic
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sedlak
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D003379:Countertransference; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology