The patient's material as an aid to the disciplined working through of the countertransference and supervision.
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.
Sedlak
Vic
V
sedlak@blueyonder.co.uk
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