Imagination, Embodied Experiences, and Meaning in Supervision

Abstract

In psychoanalysis, there is a growing emphasis on being and becoming, personally embodied experiences, self-expression, spontaneity, and presymbolic understandings. Therefore, the supervisee and the supervisor search for the meanings of the verbal and nonverbal, presymbolic and symbolic, and mental and bodily therapeutic and supervisory materials. This paper will describe the spontaneous, subjective, and prereflective understandings that emerge in supervision. These understandings require an open dialogue between the participants to formulate experience-near interpretations that feel real. To create an effective and fruitful dialogue, the supervisee and the supervisor should recognize and validate each other as separate and autonomous professionals who view their similarities within the context of otherness. Mutual recognition enables them to achieve higher-order conceptualization and creative interpretations of the therapeutic reality that unfolds in supervision. To strengthen mutual recognition, the supervisee and supervisor can acknowledge their vulnerability as people and professionals.

Keywords:

• Supervision
• embodied experiences
• dialogue
• versions of reality
• mutual recognition
• imaginings

In psychoanalysis, we have witnessed a growing influence of the epistemological approach that highlights a spontaneous, embodied, intuitive, and prereflective understanding of the therapeutic reality. According to this approach, the spontaneous and intuitive grasp of the therapeutic reality enables the therapist to formulate and interpret creatively unsymbolized phenomena. Therapeutic reality refers to all that exists and occurs independently of the participants’ motivations in a therapeutic space (Auchincloss & Samberg, 2012). This reality includes mental and emotional states, embodied experiences, symbols, and implicit and explicit communications. Thus, Winnicott (1965/1989) writes that despite the capacity of a creative impulse to form logical and organized thinking about therapeutic materials, a better alternative is "to think hallucinatorily." This type of thinking enables the therapist to "reach out for symbols and to create imaginatively and in preverbal language." (Winnicott, 1965/1989, p. 157).

This approach seems especially relevant for supervision because the supervisee and the supervisor focus on reconstructing the therapeutic reality and understanding and interpreting its different aspects, including the presymbolic and embodied experiences and communications. However, since these dimensions of the therapeutic reality are highly subjective and contextual, a dialogue between the supervisee and the supervisor is required to bridge their different perceptions and beliefs. Drawing on analytic and philosophical writers, I will suggest that this dialogue often comprises a dialectical element because of the participants’ existential urge to define and assert themselves as professionals. Without mutual recognition and respect for each other’s positions, they might highlight their differences, nourish an aggressive competitiveness, and try to impose their positions on each other. However, the dialectical process becomes productive when the participants achieve mutual recognition and validation as autonomous and independent professionals. Acknowledging their vulnerability helps the supervisor and the supervisee recognize and validate each other, restrain their competitiveness and aggression, and join their separate struggles to understand the supervisory materials.

I will begin this paper by elaborating on the spontaneous, intuitive, and subjective understanding of supervisory materials and the dialogue that evolves between the supervisor and supervisee, including dialectical elements. Later, I will describe how mutual recognition helps the supervisory dyad maintain a fruitful dialogue and co-construct the meanings of the unfolding therapeutic reality. Finally, I will discuss potential criticism toward spontaneous and intuitive understandings and the notion of dialectical tension in the supervisory process.

Embodied experiences and prereflective understanding

The vibrant psychoanalytic world continuously changes while preserving the fundamental understanding of healthy and pathological human development, relationships, and the principles of maintaining a productive therapeutic process. Among the changes in the practice of psychoanalysis are highlighting being and becoming instead of discovering unconscious meanings (Eshel, 2013), lived experience and authenticity instead of conscious and unconscious processes and inner schemas (Carrere, 2008), and the ontological instead of the epistemological (Ogden, 2019). From this perspective, the therapist’s role primarily includes emotional participation and containment in the evolving therapeutic relationship. The role also includes facilitating an intersubjective environment and the participants’ search for authentic self-expression and a unique voice (Corradi Fiumara, 2009). Furthermore, when the patient and therapist enter and recover from shared regressive states, they learn something significant about their old wounds and subjective and intersubjective patterns (Eigen, 2012). Despite maintaining experiential and theoretical knowledge at the back of their minds while immersed in the therapeutic process, the therapists struggle to "eschew memories and desires" and be fully present (Bion, 1970, p. 31).

In this perception of therapy, the communication between patient and therapist includes explicit and implicit, presymbolic and symbolic, and verbal and nonverbal messages. Winnicott (1965a) significantly contributed to understanding "silent" communications transmitted through emotional-sensual channels between the participants in the therapeutic space. According to Winnicott, each person has a hidden and authentic split part that communicates "silently with subjective objects" that is immune to the reality principle (p. 184). This split part of the self only communicates nonverbally in a way that is "like the music of the spheres, absolutely personal. It belongs to being alive." (Winnicott, 1965b, p. 191). In a conference presentation, Winnicott (1962) described how understanding the silent self’s communications is vital for healthy personal growth. Thus, while hearing and responding to their children’s silent communications even before transmitted, the parents nurture the children’s experience of subjective omnipotence that is vital for personal development. In time, the children will gradually relinquish the need to experience subjective omnipotence and adopt the reality principle. Failing to communicate in this way impoverishes the child’s self, leaving it incommunicado and incapable of understanding and accepting reality. Therefore, while colluding with their patients and only attending to explicit verbal communications, therapists fail to see that the patients tell them other things underneath the verbal content.

Emphasizing being, becoming, experiencing, and silently communicating is associated with embodied experiences because the body can tell stories that cannot be put into words. Feeling and thinking processes also characterize the body, which remembers what the mind chooses to forget and marginalize (Van Der Kolk, 2015). Analytic writers, such as Gallese (2009) and Lemma (2014) came to appreciate the role of bodily sensations and perceptions while seeking to understand the self and the world. They suggested that unsymbolized communications spontaneously arouse embodied experiences and activate implicit prereflective mental processes that translate them into symbolic expressions (Ceccoli, 2021). This mental activity is essential to surviving and leading a meaningful life.

In parallel to analytic thinkers, existentialists highlight the notion that our understanding of others emerges prereflectively, mainly through embodied experiences that cannot be analyzed into their components. This way of communicating and understanding inspires a heightened sense of existence and feelings of aliveness, realness, significance, and being at home in the world (Zahavi, 2005), contradicts others’ unpredictability, and strengthens our well-being (Ratcliffe, 2008; Sheets-Johnstone, 2016). Moreover, understanding our interlocutors’ discourses through embodied experiences and prereflective processes enables us to engage in genuine dialogue without objectifying them (Michelman, 2010). Objectification refers to observing someone from an external point in a dehumanizing way, like an object or commodity without autonomy, subjectivity, agency, or dignity (Oliveira Moreira et al., 2023).

Applying this epistemic understanding to the therapeutic process means that the therapist is not a subject who observes and interprets the object from the outside but through a process that includes a temporary loss of self and other boundaries. In this way, the therapist does not objectify the patient and maintains a non-judgmental position of a sympathetic witness to the patient’s inner struggles. Thus, Preston (2008) writes that "when the therapeutic moment is rich and alive, the analyst does not ‘assign’ meaning to the event—the meaning emerges from it. It feels like the meaning has been ‘in there’ all along, yet this is a creative moment—the moment when discovering and creating are not two separate things" (Preston, 2008, p. 353). While the patient and the therapist maintain an open, attentive, and flexible dialogue, the unprompted emergence of new meanings enables them to understand each other’s genuine implicit perspective (Lyons-Ruth, 2006) and to talk to each other about what is currently alive and real in their interaction (Ogden, 2015).

The emergence of new meanings of unsymbolized affective states and communications can result from an embodied self that increases our sense of ownership and acceptance of our bodies. The embodied self exists alongside the reflective self (the "I"), the subjective object (the "me"), and the objectified self (the "it"). Furthermore, the embodied self can grasp the world without conscious, introspective, logical, or symbolic thinking and helps us to develop authorship of our own actions (Celenza, 2020; Kernberg, 2015). While listening to a written or spoken discourse, our embodied selves focus on the discourse’s "music and dance" and integrate and translate our unsymbolized internal bodily reactions and "proto-emotional states" into verbal expressions that become interpretations (Goldberg, 2020, p. 808). The discourse’s features that arouse our embodied experiences include voice intonation, silences, gestures, body postures, and "rhythms of cadence, tone, intensity, and movement" (Markman, 2020, p. 807). The capacity to symbolize psychic elements organized in incomprehensible language positions the concept of embodied self near other central concepts such as transitional space and dream-like reverie (Bromberg, 2003).

In this discussion, the analytic and existentialist authors describe the spontaneous, intuitive, and non-objectifying prereflective understanding of the co-created immediate intersubjective reality and its significance for the therapeutic process. To implement the notion of embodied understanding in supervision work, Sletvold (2016) described a working model of "embodied supervision" (p. 411). In this model, supervisees are asked to share their feelings while physically moving between chairs that symbolize the different positions of the therapist, patient, and another person. According to Sletvold, this exercise generated the reflective and mentalizing capacities of the supervisee. In contrast to Sletvold’s approach, I do not offer a new supervisory model or special technique. Instead, I will examine the subjective and intersubjective elements that facilitate the supervisory participants’ spontaneous, intuitive, and embodied understandings and lead to a dialogue between the supervisee and the supervisor.

Imagining and prereflective understanding in supervision

The roles of the supervisee and the supervisor include understanding their shared reality and the therapeutic reality that emerges from the supervisee’s narrative, parallel processes, and other transference manifestations. Each reality is complex, multi-layered, and comprises subjective and intersubjective elements, and understanding it requires the participants to immerse themselves in it. These realities reflect and influence each other, and understanding something significant about one transforms the view of the other. Moreover, the participants’ experiential and theoretical knowledge, personal and professional worldviews, and commitment to learning from their lived experiences shape their understandings. However, despite their shared supervisory goals, the supervisor and the supervisee have different ways of recreating the therapeutic reality, forming distinct perspectives.

To recreate a therapeutic reality, supervisees recall, relive, and narrate what happened in the therapeutic space that aroused their embodied experiences and activated their embodied selves. In contrast, to recreate the therapeutic reality, the supervisors who identify with their supervisees conjure up the narrated therapeutic scenes as vividly as possible. Without imagining the narrated therapeutic scenes, what happened in the therapeutic space remains emotionally detached and abstract. Furthermore, the supervisors’ embodied experiences, such as cringing, stomachache, heavy breathing, and dizziness, activate their embodied selves that closely observe, explore, and contextualize these experiences. This process, which can often be recognized only retrospectively, is spontaneous, automatic, and prereflective. It translates inarticulate emotional states and unthought thoughts into verbal expressions that construct the supervisor’s interpretation.

The analytic concepts of projection and identification can explain the supervisor’s capacity to vividly imagine the supervisee’s therapeutic experiences and understand them intuitively. These processes occur because the emotionally intense supervisory environment sometimes promotes temporary regression and primary mental operations. Thus, Frawley-O’Dea (2003) explains that when the supervisory environment becomes a flexible potential space, regression inevitably emerges in both the supervisee and the supervisor. The supervisor discovers that this regression conveys valuable information about the therapeutic and supervisory processes and the participants’ subjectivities. In addition, recollecting similar clinical situations helps the supervisor momentarily identify with the supervisee’s therapeutic struggles because the supervisee’s experiences become more tangible. This process enlivens the therapeutic narrative, evokes embodied experiences, and promotes the supervisor’s prereflective understanding of the narrated therapeutic experiences. Thus, from the neuroscientific perspective, while imagining or perceiving another person doing something, we create an embodied stimulation of cortical and subcortical motor centers that is usually activated while taking the same action. For example, when we imagine eating a favorable food, we activate the same brain center that is usually activated while actually eating this food. These research findings blur the traditional division between mental imagery and visual or motor perception (Gallese, 2011). However, the supervisor’s process of imagining the therapeutic scenes deserves more attention because it is crucial for the process of prereflective understanding of the therapeutic reality.

The supervisor can imagine the narrated therapeutic experiences either unintentionally and spontaneously or intentionally and systematically. The first type of imagining is immediate, spontaneous, and involuntary and leads to an initial grasp of the narrated therapeutic interaction. Langer (1942) compares this process to dream work that helps us to make meaning of unsymbolized experiences and promote self-expression. However, such preliminary and involuntary imaginings cannot fully represent the interlocutor’s experiences (Levine, 2012). Therefore, the supervisor simulates the narrated therapeutic interactions deliberately and systematically while adding details that are missing from the supervisee’s narrative. This simulation helps the supervisor create a fictional reality, an imaginary story based on true facts and organized according to logical rules but significantly shaped by the supervisor’s implicit motivations and past experiences. Like artistic creation, a fictitious representation is not self-deception but “a different kind of truth, one which relies on a process of ‘evocation’” (Hinshelwood, 2020, p. 34). Creating this fictional reality enables the supervisor to examine and formulate overwhelming emotional states, intense conflicts, and ambiguous and incomprehensible experiences.

Moreover, it enables the supervisor to learn about the supervisee’s fears, hopes, perceptions, and emotional responses within the therapeutic space. Despite the struggle to represent the therapeutic events accurately, the constructed fictional reality is significantly shaped by the supervisor’s subjectivity, including the subjective image of the supervisee as a therapist. Therefore, the supervisor’s signature as a person and therapist is interwoven with the more direct representations of the therapeutic reality. The new meanings that emerge prereflectively serve as the basis for an open dialogue with the supervisee about the therapeutic process and, specifically, the supervisee’s contribution to it.

I will present a vignette from a supervision session with Natalie (pseudonym) to illustrate the operation of the supervisor’s embodied self and the process of creating a fictional reality that leads to a new understanding of the supervisee’s therapeutic experiences. Despite the importance of the intersubjective context of the supervisory vignette, I will focus on my own emotional responses, associations, and speculations to minimize compromising the anonymity of Natalie and the patient.

Vignette

Natalie is a relatively experienced therapist who wishes to learn about clinical analytic concepts and grow as a psychodynamic therapist. In the first months of supervision, my supervisory relationship with her developed gradually and cautiously and we have learned about each other’s sensitivities. This learning occurred when, on several occasions, we explored the tension that arose while discussing therapeutic incidents that threatened the flow of the therapeutic process. On these occasions, after trying to explore Natalie’s emotional responses and motivations, I noticed her uneasiness. As later emerged from discussing these incidents, Nataly felt that underneath my probing questions was hidden criticism of her contributions to the therapeutic process. From my perspective, she expressed over-­sensitivity to my exploration of the intersubjective contexts of therapeutic incidents. In our discussions, Natalie explained her sensitivity as resulting from many past experiences in which others implicitly criticized her. I explained that while being unable to comprehend the clinical situations, I probably clung to theoretical conventions, which probably led me to implicit criticism. Apparently, these discussions helped us to be more responsive to each other’s vulnerabilities and needs and feel safer in the supervisory framework. In addition, on several occasions, Natalie showed interest in my therapeutic experiences during my initial phases as a therapist and wanted to compare them with her own experiences. I suggested that her request was an attempt to balance our supervisory relationship in which she was more vulnerable because she shared her intimate work with patients. Moreover, our discussions sometimes urged me to rethink different clinical issues and change my positions on various therapeutic issues. In a recent session, Natalie discussed the therapy with a patient struggling to restore his personal and familial life after a series of undermining events. In previous sessions, Natalie had expressed her concern that this patient would not cope well with anxiety aroused in the therapeutic process because he was not committed enough to the therapeutic framework. At a certain point, Natalie said that, after a disappointing meeting with a psychiatrist, the patient had stopped playing with the fantasy that he could find a miraculous solution to his interpersonal issues and anxieties. Natalie was relieved by the patient’s communication and felt that this therapeutic event indicated progress in the patient’s means of coping with challenges but also heightened the patient’s expectations from the therapy. Natalie appeared to anticipate my response to this incident, and I assumed that she expected it to be affirmative. Nevertheless, I did not know how to respond because I could not remember her having mentioned that the patient entertained such a fantasy. If the patient tended to fantasize about magical solutions to his problems, it would illuminate his personal struggles and therapeutic challenges differently. Moreover, I could not reconcile this information about the patient with other details I had heard about him and wondered why it had never come up in supervision.

I wondered if Natalie’s omission of the patient’s tendency to fantasize about miraculous solutions was associated with something in the therapeutic or supervisory relationship. Many possible explanations of the therapeutic and supervisory interactions and their relationship occurred to me, but none seemed more plausible than others, and I found myself engaged in repetitive thoughts. After being preoccupied with these issues for a while, it occurred to me that I should explore them with Natalie. However, I doubted if that was the right moment because I felt that the therapeutic reality was still incomprehensible, and trying to explore it might lead us to problematic patterns that had previously occurred.

I decided to summon my clinical experiences with patients who entertained fantasies of magical solutions to their problems. I recalled one patient who obsessively sought magical solutions outside of the therapeutic framework despite my repetitive attempts to convince her about the importance of concentrating on our therapy. I remembered that exploring this therapeutic incident had led to overwhelming thoughts and feelings in the patient and in me, leading us to surprising understandings that had been difficult to digest. This memory strengthened my decision to leave the exploration with Natalie for a better time, and I let my thoughts wander. It then occurred to me that, like many times in the past, I could understand Natalie’s experiences during the therapeutic interaction by vividly imagining what she had told me. From experience, imagining the supervisee’s narrated therapeutic experiences helps me identify with the supervisees and appreciate their singularity as therapists. This mental activity would help me understand something that simple words cannot communicate.

I immersed myself in imagining the physical characteristics of the therapeutic dyad and environment, according to my inner image of Natalie’s personal and professional style and based on several details she had disclosed in previous sessions. While imagining the narrated therapeutic scene, I visualized the faces of the patient and Natalie, looked into their eyes, and tried to read what was going through their minds as they exchanged communications. While engaged in these imaginings, a bodily sensation of unexplained heaviness emerged. This sensation reminded me of the experience of carrying a backpack stuffed with clothes and utensils on hiking trips several years before. I was intrigued by this distinct bodily experience and the subsequent associations but failed to connect them with either the therapeutic or the supervisory context.

I let my thoughts wander to explore the meaning of this imagined bodily experience. I recalled experiencing a similar bodily sensation after committing myself to a professional role in a mental health clinic for an extended period. I accepted the role, despite being aware that I would receive neither help nor appreciation for my special efforts and would probably regret taking it on. This association led me to speculate that this association reflected the feelings and thinking processes of either Natalie or the patient, who could not express them openly. Furthermore, if it reflected Natalie’s unsymbolized experiences, she might have committed herself to burdensome duties despite inner reluctance. It occurred to me, then, that whether this speculation was accurate or not, it would be worthwhile to examine it cautiously with Natalie, which might initiate an interesting dialogue between us. I believe that an open dialogue usually enables access to unthought emotional states and motivations.

I suggested to Natalie that the relief she had felt after interpreting the patient’s mental state might not have emanated from a change in the patient’s patterns but from her own sense of relief following encumbering experiences in her role as a therapist. I added that if this suggestion resonated with her, we needed to explore what had initiated these burdensome experiences, in either the therapeutic or the supervisory spaces. After some deliberation, Natalie said that she had been emotionally involved in this therapeutic relationship and believed that it had developed well. However, she might have recently taken a more active and supportive role, which might have become cumbersome. Following Natalie’s comment, it occurred to me that being excessively active might have emanated from her efforts to be a therapist, according to an idealized model she had adopted. I was aware that this emergent speculation might be idiosyncratic, but once again, it could serve as an initial suggestion in a dialogue between Natalie and me.

In retrospect, my choice to imagine the therapeutic scene that led to an embodied experience was not born from a strategy or elaborate planning. Instead, it emanated from the feeling that I had to immerse myself in the therapeutic scenes and that my internal sensations and impressions would help me to extricate myself from the meandering, unproductive, and detached thinking process. Drawing on experience, I felt that imagining Natalie’s therapeutic experiences would help me identify with her and lead to an understanding of her experiences in the therapeutic interaction. Moreover, I could invent concrete details to complete the clinical picture portrayed by Natalie because I had a cohesive image of her therapeutic style and recalled similar clinical experiences. While imagining the therapeutic scenes, I had a bodily experience of heaviness that apparently symbolized emotional heaviness. This surprising experience seemed incompatible with the context, resonating with Stern’s Stern (2013) description of the unbidden bodily responses that emerge before conscious reflection. Therefore, I assumed that it reflected Natalie’s emotional state while she was reliving her therapeutic experiences. As Gallese (2009) writes, while witnessing another person’s emotional state and behavior, we develop an embodied simulation that expresses our identification with this person and enables us to represent these mental features internally.

Attributing my embodied experience to Natalie’s emotional state led me to speculate that Natalie felt a relief but instead of owning this emotional state, she attributed it to the patient. Before discussing this interpretation with Natalie, it could not be considered a valid explanation of what had happened in the therapeutic or supervisory spaces. It was an initial step to accurately describing the ambiguous and multi-layered therapeutic reality. Furthermore, if Natalie had not resonated with this explanation, I would have wondered what might have led to its emergence and sense of realness. In addition, as with therapeutic interpretations, this interpretation must be validated by promoting the supervisory and, indirectly, the therapeutic processes.

Contradictory versions of therapeutic reality

In the supervisory space, the supervisee and the supervisor feel, think, and respond to each other and co-create an intersubjective reality that promotes their separate and joint projects and helps them overcome misunderstandings and controversies. Moreover, Winnicott (1971) explains that the co-created and shared reality is important for nurturing psychic life. Thus, in early life, the simultaneous contact with the reality shared with the parent and the external reality enables the child to discover the limits of omnipotence. It also helps the child to understand the difference between "that which is subjective and that which is actual or shared reality," develop embodied experience and self-differentiation, experience the other as a whole, separate and emotionally available, and capable of perceiving reality uniquely (Winnicott, 1971, p. 47). Zeddies (2001), who borrowed these theoretical beliefs for therapeutic work, suggests that contact with the therapeutic and the external realities helps the patient to develop self-awareness, reduce distress, and enhance the quality of life. The Bionian dreaming of these separate realities assists in deconstructing, de-concretizing, redreaming, and integrating them (Ferro, 2012, p. 273).

Nonetheless, the intersubjective reality shared by the supervisee and the supervisor is not the only reality in the supervisory space. While living this reality in the present moment, the two participants recreate the intersubjective reality of the therapeutic space. However, the different perspectives of the supervisee and the supervisor lead them to construct two distinct versions of the therapeutic reality. To illustrate the difference between their versions, we can observe the difference between the experiences of the person who lived through a traumatic event and currently talks about it and the person who listens to the traumatic narrative. Apparently, the narrator will develop full-scale trauma, whereas the listener will develop vicarious trauma. Indeed, vicarious trauma might elicit inexplicable, intrusive, and repetitive undermining responses such as helplessness, insomnia, and unbalanced emotional states. Despite the similarities between the two responses, the emotional intensity and the disruptive effects of vicarious trauma are moderate compared with the effects of living through intolerable traumatic events. It is noteworthy that unawareness of the impact of vicarious trauma might lead the listener to inflict secondary trauma on the already traumatized narrator (Boulanger, 2018).

Often, the differences between the reality perceptions of the supervisee and the supervisor create tension that requires an open and flexible dialogue between them. Before describing the dialogue in the supervisory space, I will briefly mention analytic writers’ descriptions of dialogue in the therapeutic space. Thus, Ferenczi understood the relationship between patient and therapist as bidirectional and reciprocal unconscious communication, "a dialogue of unconsciouses" that helps to clarify and interpret the participant’s own and their interlocutors’ self-experiences (p. 105). Other writers suggested that through attunement and non-authoritarian and respectful dialogue, the therapist meets the patient’s emotional world and interprets it similarly to the patient’s interpretation (Orange, 2010). In such a dialogue, the patient and therapist negotiate, compromise, and collaborate to co-create understandings, and their engaged subjectivities influence and transform each other (Zeddies, 2001). The dialogue enables them to solve "the messy interaction of two perceptions of reality by finding a new ‘match’ at a more complex level of meaning" (Harrison & Tronick, 2022, p. 191).

However, the dialogue that emerges in the therapeutic space is often far from ideal and consists of underlying conflicts and dialectical tension. Psychoanalytic therapy is "a matrix of dialectical tensions" between inner and relational processes and between the subjectivities of the patient and the therapist (Mitchell, 1997, p. 24). Ogden (2004) describes that within the therapeutic dialogue, the phenomenon of projective identification emerges as "a mutually creating, negating, and preserving dialectic of subjects, each of whom allows himself to be ‘subjugated’ by the other" (p. 189). In this description, the separate subjects, the patient and the therapist, develop asymmetrical mutual subjugation that eventually leads to creating the analytic third that transforms them. Drawing on Hegel’s (1807/1977) model, Ogden suggests that despite feeling that their "own self-consciousness is somehow contained in the other," the patient and therapist subjugate and negate each other while interacting in the therapeutic space (p. 189).

Other analytic writers draw on Hegel’s model. Thus, for example, Mills (2021) writes that the patient and therapist are propelled by the urge to be recognized by each other and define and assert themselves because "identity is always defined in opposition to difference" (Mills, 2021, p. 116). Benjamin (2004) gives an example that illustrates this implicit tendency of the participants in the therapeutic dialogue. She describes a clinical situation in which the patient believes that the therapist is toxic and makes her ill. On such occasions, "both partners experience the impossibility of acknowledging the other’s reality without abandoning one’s own… often signaled by the feeling expressed in the question, ‘Am I crazy or is it you?’" (Mills, 2021, p. 31).

The dialogue’s dynamic is different when characterized by mutual recognition. In these cases, the aggressive forces can be sublated and overcome, and the participants can achieve a higher-order conceptualization recognition. In an interaction characterized by mutual recognition, each participant "experiences the other as a ‘like subject,’ another mind who can be ‘felt with,’ yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception." (Benjamin, 2004, p. 5). Stern et al. (1998) explain that in mutual recognition, the patient and therapist acknowledge each other’s desires, motives, and implicit goals that guide their actions. In this intersubjective state, they confirm and signal their acceptance of each other (p. 874). Slochower (2017) believes that beyond providing the patient’s regressive needs by holding, a good therapy’s goal is developing mutual recognition and helping the patient expand the capacity for creating similar relationships outside therapy. Moreover, mutual recognition can occur only when both recognize their "fundamental vulnerability." (Butler, 2000, p, 287).

In parallel to the patient and therapist, the supervisee and supervisor also develop different perspectives, described by Zwiebel (2007) as the phenomenon of "double bifocality" that is influenced by their locations, subjectivities, and emotional urgency (p. 46). Thus, in a study that examined supervisees’ and supervisors’ perceptions, there were vast differences in their perspectives on what happened in the therapeutic and supervisory spaces (Cabaniss et al., 2001). In another recent study that explored supervisory work in a group, even entry-level trainees had different perspectives from their supervisors, and discussing their differences led to new meanings (Sapountzis et al., 2022). When the supervisee and the supervisor hold contradictory versions of the therapeutic reality, their dialogue can threaten their well-being and relationship.

On such occasions, the supervisee might wonder with respect to the supervisor: If you cannot accept my version of the therapeutic reality, how can you believe in me as a therapist? In parallel, the supervisor might wonder with respect to the supervisee: If you cannot accept my version of the therapeutic reality, how can you believe in me as a therapist and mentor? When the answers are negative, the underlying destructive forces invade and undermine the healthy and growth-promoting relationship. The undermining of the supervisory relationship can often be formulated only in retrospect. However, according to the perspective suggested by Stern et al. (1998), Benjamin (2004), and others, the participants can restore their balanced and fruitful dialogue and achieve mutual recognition by acknowledging their vulnerabilities. In particular, the supervisor responsible for the integrity of the supervisory process must awaken to his or her inherent vulnerability as the first step to restoring a productive dialogue. Supervisors must awaken to their vulnerability because the supervisory relationship’s power structure is unbalanced. The vast experiential and theoretical knowledge and the role of appreciating others’ work amplify the supervisors’ authority.

To connect with their vulnerability, supervisors can think about their wish for success and the dread of failure that might reverberate in their professional community. Despite having a record of many successes, supervisors’ sense of professional self-worth depends, to some extent, on teamwork with the supervisees, who often belong to the same professional community. In addition, supervisors are anxious to succeed because they view their supervisory work as a vital means of passing on experiential and theoretical analytic knowledge. Acknowledging these risks is likely to lead supervisors to awaken to their own vulnerability within the supervisory process as the first step to establishing a genuine and fruitful dialogue in supervision.

Concluding remarks

The description of the immediate supervisory action presented in this paper might arouse criticism from analytic supervisors. Thus, the act of imagining and embodied attunement might seem irrelevant to supervisors who believe that their central role includes passing on analytic knowledge and assessing the supervisees’ clinical capacities and development. From this perspective, attunement to embodied experiences, the focus on spontaneous and intuitive understanding, and the marginalization of abstractions and theoretical reasoning might seem unprofessional. Nonetheless, the power of imagination has been recognized in science, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Imagining narrated experiences to understand ambiguous and multi-layered therapeutic reality frees supervisors from fixed ideas and rigid thinking patterns and gives access to new meanings and understandings. Moreover, when supervisors keep their imaginations alive, they see more options, “challenge stale ideas and the inappropriate use of authority,” and “generously encourage the next generation” (Aron, 2003, p. 285). The supervisors’ spontaneous, intuitive, and prereflective understanding animates the supervisory and therapeutic processes and inspires professional trust in their clinical capacities.

Another criticism of the theoretical suggestions presented in this article can be directed at highlighting the destructive forces underlying each dialogue. Contemporary Western culture praises dialogue in our unstable and conflictual world, and supervisors embrace it to achieve mutual recognition and growth. Therefore, portraying dialogue as motivated by “dark” forces threatens to rob supervisors of a promising device to promote the supervisory process. However, as Winnicott (1971) already suggested, human existence is laden with destructive wishes and fantasies, and we can grow only by surviving this destructiveness. In applying this principle to therapy, he wrote: “Without the experience of maximum destructiveness (object not protected) the subject never places the analyst outside and therefore can never experience more than a kind of self-analysis, using the analyst as a projection of part of the self” (p. 91).

In addition, acknowledging the vulnerability that was offered here as sine qua non for maintaining dialogue is also important for creating an intersubjective environment of sameness and solidarity in the supervisory space. Only by acknowledging their vulnerability can supervisors close the a priori structural gap between their own and the supervisees’ sense of safety. Without closing this painful gap, the supervisory environment cannot promote personal growth through continuously searching for self-expression and singularity as professionals.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).