Three Associating: Adventures in Relational Psychoanalytic Supervision

In this episode, Rachael⁠ revisits the complex feelings that child sexual abuse evoke in both patient and therapist. Rachael discovers that her wish for magic powers has not disappeared and has reappeared in a different form. Beyond this, Rachael contacts both the magic and the terror of the therapeutic journey itself and the loneliness this sometimes produces in the therapist.

Both Gill and Rachael conclude that while trauma itself is to be regretted, the person that we emerge as in the wake of trauma is to be embraced as a crucial and valuable aspect of our autobiography.

In this episode, Andrew surprises himself by the degree to which his patient has led him into dissociating from his own inner subjectivity and into merging with the patient's agenda. This agenda, in turn, reflects the patient's merged state with his partner so that “two become one”.

Andrew is able to use supervision to take up a third position and to take a perspective which frees him to use his own thoughts, thereby helping the patient shape his own subjectivity independently of his partner.

In this episode, Rachael approaches the taboo of sexual attraction in therapy and its tendency to lead to dysregulation, involuntary self-disclosure, and shame. 

Rachael's feelings unduly amplify her self-consciousness, complicating the ongoing therapeutic task of understanding her and her patient's contribution to the co-construction of their relational field.

After engaging Rachael in a discussion of the reality/fantasy divide and the difference between voluntary and involuntary self disclosure, Gill invites a recourse to theory both as a stabilising force in the choppy waters of the embodied and as a way of retaining the boundaries of supervision versus therapy.

In this episode it becomes clear that Andrew and his patient Manuela are unconsciously co-constructing a dynamic in which Manuela is under pressure to be cultured and cool in order to maintain Andrew's admiration, while Andrew is under pressure to take up a lesser position. As the supervision unfolds, Andrew becomes aware of how his envy is at the heart of this dynamic and how he is projecting certain longings onto Manuela. He becomes aware this leads to both an underplaying of Manuela’s limits and vulnerabilities and the overplaying of his own and keeps her stuck in a relational impasse. In the session, Andrew moves to a more balanced perception of Manuela’s plight and a greater recognition of his own contribution to her relational dynamic.

Rachael comes to realise that feeling provoked by the patient’s apparent self-centredness in enactments that occur in the waiting room and in the session has led to a wish to be provocative in return. She first enjoys then tussles with revenge fantasies. By talking through these fantasies and owning their pleasure, she recognises their meaning, and this opens up multiple perspectives.

In this episode, Rachael encounters a worthy adversary in the elegant and charismatic Iris. Beguiled by Iris charm and colourful stories Rachael can’t help feeling seduced.  However she also feels manipulated and is  irritated with herself and Iris.  Nevertheless she still feels the pull to captivation in the session. In the end, Rachael ⁠ realises that the most worthy adversary that she has is herself and in freeing herself contemplates helping Iris to be both her charismatic and her vulnerable self.

In this episode, Andrew struggles to disrupt his patient's rigid self-control, ever mindful of a psychotic potential that could be unleashed given the patient's history of experiencing a psychotic episode. Andrew experiences both the seductions of a meeting of minds and the potential tyranny of his patient's mind that fears the body, its appetites, and affects.

In this episode, Rachael is provoked by a disrupted patient. Power struggles and challenges emerge in the room as Rachael struggles to think and not enact in the face of the patient's enactments.  Technical questions of courageous speech versus disruptive challenges are engaged as Rachael shows great integrity and courage in taking in the challenges of supervision to come to an expanded understanding of trauma.

In this episode, Andy is frustratingly blocked by his patient's difficulty in listening and by her incessant talking, both of which reveal parts of her self and mask others. Ironically, Andy himself has to surrender into listening rather than talking and into only having recognised small snippets of his thoughts, if any at all. He becomes aware of the deprivation under his patient's excess and how this fuels the discrepancy between her subjective reality and his experience of her.

In this episode, we encounter Rachael's struggle with an avoidant patient who is fearful of closeness. Rachael is conflicted between her desire for the patient to make progress and to stay present to the work and to 'dine in', and her awareness that, for his desire to move forward to emerge, she needs to take a step back and let him continue with 'take away' for a while longer.