Self-Supervision

Self-Supervision: Psychodynamic Strategies invites therapists to construct ways to achieve a more extensive and effective self-awareness and develop a 'self-supervisory self.' Appealing to teachers, students, and supervisors, Dr. Marc Lubin and Dr. Jed Yalof outline a process of teaching, learning, and strengthening a self-supervisory attitude. This book highlights how self-supervision can be taught and how its practice can deepen the treatment experience as the therapist reflects and takes "second-and-third-looks" through repeated dives into the clinical material, where each successive look has the promise of insight and understanding. The processing moves from the surface of conscious thought to the integration of less conscious experiences that tie back to the clinical exchange but with a different perspective, enhanced by listening to the self-supervisory self. The authors recommend strategies through case illustrations that provide therapists with a roadmap for processing clinical exchanges while working in a diverse set of psychotherapy training contexts.

This approach informs the patient-therapist-supervisor experience by describing methods for achieving a deeper and more informed self-supervisory experience. How, for example, will a therapist know that they achieved an alternative state of understanding of a complex clinical interaction when self-supervising in response to the manifest clinical material? How does the therapist articulate and describe how this shift occurred? What were the steps that led to a new perspective where a key word in a transcript review or process note triggered a series of seemingly random associations, which, when tracked in a stepwise sequence of 'a, then b, then c,' led to an elaborated and coherent narrative of what felt initially like a moment of impasse? How did the coalescence of this material illuminate not only the patient's underlying dynamics but also served to clarify aspects of the supervisory relationship that were not obvious prior to the self-supervisory activity? These are the type of questions addressed in this creative, teachable, and psychodynamically informed approach to self-supervision.