... or, Reflections on My Supervision Study Program Experience.
After being asked to sum up my experience of The Psychotherapy Institute's (TPI) Supervision Study Program (SSP)—both for TPI's Viewpoint and earlier, in a more limited way, for my 2009 SSP graduation speech—I kept coming back to this question:
How do you learn to teach what Freud suggested was an "impossible profession"?
Among many things, my experience of the SSP gave me a respect for the complexity and myriad challenges of learning our "impossible profession," of teaching it, and of the SSP program itself: teaching the teaching of our profession. So much of the SSP seems to turn in on itself: to teach teaching, and teach psychotherapy and the teaching of psychotherapy in a way that can be learned, in a way that respects (if not treats) the psychology of the student, be it student therapist or student supervisor. The SSP taught me that, as with learning therapy, the turning inward is where the challenge is in learning supervision—or where it should be. As this turning inward is an essential part of the profession of therapy and teaching therapy, the Supervision Study Program taught me that interminability does not necessarily mean impossibility.
The title of Janet Malcolm’s book, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, refers to Freud's 1937 essay, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” where he writes:
It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two ... are education and government. (Standard Edition, Volume 23: 248)
Freud's "almost" above is key; as is the misleading “the” in Malcolm's subtitle. Not only did Freud not limit his pessimism to the profession of psychoanalysis, but he made it clear that he saw psychoanalysis as quite possible:
I am not intending to assert that analysis is altogether an endless business. Whatever one's theoretical attitude to the question may be, the termination of an analysis is, I think a practical matter. Every experienced analyst will be able to recall a number of cases in which he has bidden his patient a permanent farewell rebus bene gestis ['Things having gone well']. (SE 23: 249-250)
In a broad sense, Freud entertained the idea of psychoanalytic therapy as interminable, or impossible to complete, because he had a good sense that the intimate dealings of the unconscious of both the therapist and patient could only be brought to an end in a practical way, rather than in some specifically theorized way. It is the therapist’s intimacy with the unconscious that is at the heart of why Freud believes that the therapist's analysis, in fact, needs to be interminable:
It would not be surprising if the effect of a constant preoccupation with all the repressed material which struggles for freedom in the the human mind were to stir up in the analyst as well all the instinctual demands which he is otherwise able to keep under suppression. These, too, are 'dangers of analysis', though they threaten, not the passive but the active partner in the analytic situation; and we ought not to neglect to meet them.... Every analyst should periodically—at intervals of five years or so—submit himself to analysis once more, without feeling ashamed of taking this step. (SE 23: 249)
Freud understood that, after any therapy, unconscious material and dynamics would always remain, for both patient and analyst; however, the patient can and should stop when it is practical and enough work has been done, while the responsible analyst will periodically return to therapy given her or his intimacy with the "dangers of analysis."
Freud's phrase “should…submit to analysis once more,” is highly suggestive: Freud acknowledged that the therapeutic relationship was a necessarily hierarchical one, but for him this relationship would have been one where the active, masculine, dominant role of the analyst is on top, while the passive, feminine, and submissive role of the patient is on bottom. Are all hierarchical relationships necessarily ones of domination/submission? Is this why the other necessarily hierarchical professions--e.g., teaching and governance--were also deemed impossible by Freud? When we mix hierarchy and the unconscious are we bound to be frustrated in achieving certain goals? Is such achievement bound to be interminable or impossible? Certainly, Freud is off with his assumption that activity and dominance are masculine and passivity and submission are feminine; so why give the rest of this essay any import?
We might see Jessica Benjamin's Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination as a landmark correction to Freud on many of these questions (and others). However, Benjamin, ironically, seems to assume that hierarchy necessarily leads to domination, which seems more "classical" in its Hobbesian view than many of her colleagues and followers who have taken a similar "relational turn." Benjamin is brilliant on how "gender polarity" is at the root of much of the sexism of our culture, and how this sexism gets disavowed by a variety of theorists, especially psychoanalytic theorists.
Benjamin’s work is also important with respect to how the maintenance of relationships of equality requires maintaining a "necessary tension" between self-assertion and mutual recognition. Benjamin's goal in The Bonds of Love is to show that relations of equality are made more difficult within the context of a culture where there is deep-seated gender polarity. We can therefore assume that Benjamin would argue that in a relationship where there is a necessary hierarchy--e.g., parent-child, teacher-student, supervisor-supervisee, therapist-patient--it would be even more difficult to maintain the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition (potentially a type of "equality" or mutual respect within this hierarchy) than it would be to maintain that same equality in a relationship where there is or should be no hierarchy, inherent or otherwise: e.g., between life partners, between parents, between colleagues, etc. In other words, it would be more difficult to avoid some form of domination within relationships that are necessarily hierarchical.
In the tradition of Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Nancy Chodorow, among others, The Bonds of Love does provide correctives to Freud's defensive focus on the father and Oedipus, which served as a defense against the importance of the mother and, following Kohut and others, also against healthy self-love. This might be called the "masculinity complex" of psychoanalysis, as the significance of the mother is disavowed via a propping up of the father and the penis/Phallus, and early ("grandiose") identification with "her" is seen as pathological rather than crucial for healthy "selfobject" relations (Kohut).
Freud attempts to inscribe in nature the gender polarity Benjamin is trying to show as cultural and pathogenic. As the "repudiation of femininity" (250) ending of "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" shows, Freud saw a type of gender polarity as pathogenic, but he assumed the masculine "uncastrated" position represented some kind of natural ideal and was therefore unable to see that his theory of "repudiation of femininity" was itself the product of an unconscious "repudiation of femininity," in the form of a repudiation of the importance of motherhood, much as his 1938 theory of splitting (fetishism) was itself the product of splitting and disavowal (see Bass 2000 and 2006; Anders, 2007).
Benjamin would probably not simply see the separation from the mother (Mahler) behind Freud's "castration complex" screen, given her alignment with Kohut and what is now the ascendant form of infant research (Stern), both leaving little room for a type of primary narcissism, a phantasy of "oneness" free from the potential pain or trauma of relating (what Bass calls "the trauma of Eros"). With Stern, Kohut, and many broadly "relational" theorists, their assumption of a primary relatedness leaves little room for the foundations of relating being ambivalent, for recognition that relating involves some necessary component of destruction (aggression)—even a painful separation reaction, as in Mahler's work, that impacts the fantasy complex around the (m)other as separate subject. In her response to Judith Butler's criticism along these lines (2000), Benjamin, however, argues that relating does necessarily involve some Hegelian (and Winnicottian) "destruction"—or what Freud might call aggression and attribute to the death drive rather than seeing it as a necessary function of relating. According to Benjamin, "recognition is sustained only through survival of destruction; hence, destruction does essentially constitute recognition" (2000, p. 298).
Within the context of relating within necessary hierarchies, I am confident Benjamin (Butler, Winnicott, Freud, Hegel, and others) would argue that avoiding some aspects of domination (aggression, shaming) would be very difficult if not in some ways impossible. In other words, regardless of the success of the maintenance of necessary tension and regardless of the depth of mutual respect, there would inevitably be some complication of destruction, aggression, and shame for relationships that take place within necessary hierarchies. When these complexities are also amped up by our tendency to regress when we end up in either the up or down positions of hierarchy (necessary or not) and when these regressions tend to be unconsciously repeated (acted out, countertransference-transference) rather than remembered, we can see why Freud might have considered certain necessarily hierarchical relationships (professions) exceedingly difficult, if not “impossible”—especially psychoanalysis, which in some ways relies on these regressions or resistances in order to work (through transference).
Psychoanalytic supervision, therefore, might be considered "impossible squared" in this context, since it requires the combination of two potentially "impossible" and necessarily hierarchical professions: teaching and psychoanalysis. The two-tiered system of traditional supervision—supervisor/therapist-therapist/patient—is understood to provide fertile ground for transference-countertransference that repeats from tier to tier via parallel process.
The Supervision Study Program adds a third tier to this system of traditional supervision, and yet another level of complexity to what was already "impossible squared" ("impossible cubed"?). The Psychotherapy Institute ironically created a unique three-tiered program to teach “how to teach therapy” in a way that is at once aware of hierarchies and their potential for both domination (non-recognition) and regression (shame): i.e., teaching "relational" supervision. Adding a third tier of relational system (teacher-of-the-supervisor/supervisor-in-training/supervisee) creates a third level where parallel process can play out, and it doubles the "virtual" relationships of traditional supervision: from between the supervisor and the supervisee’s patient to between SSP faculty consultant and student therapist, supervisor and supervisee’s patient. Moreover, since this training takes place within an institute of members, with both student therapists (the intern community) and student supervisors (the SSP community), these multi-tiered "virtual" relationships increase exponentially.
The repetition of parallel processes (transference-countertransference between tiers) and the potential shame of being a student supervisor/student therapist/patient were the two key themes that were central to the experience of the SSP, and ultimately are the core of what the SSP succeeded in teaching. But is shame necessarily so central to teaching and therapy? Above I argued that Freud's conception of therapy as potentially interminable or impossible had to do with the unconscious in a broad sense--with respect to both therapist and patient. What made therapy potentially impossible for Freud more narrowly was the inevitability of a certain type of very difficult if not impossible resistance: the inevitability of "resistance against recovery" itself (238). In his usual avoidance of the significance of the early mother, Freud focuses on ultimately later (Oedipal) and patrocentric conflicts to ground the inevitability of resistance to recovery. A matrocentric extension of Freud's basic point of the inevitability of resistance in therapy would read Freud's castration complex conclusion as an ultimately defensive fantasy of Freud's, defending against the centrality of the mother during the transition from primary to secondary narcissism.
What Freud might have argued--if he had not had his own "mother/woman complex"--was that, in therapy, the inevitability of resistance to recovery itself is grounded in the inevitability of running into potentially overwhelming shame during therapy's inevitable regression to the basic transition from oneness-with-the-mother to being in-relation-with-a-separate-(m)other, a maternal subject. So, being in hierarchical relation would call up this early anxiety, as would recognizing the (m)other as a subject. (Reducing the (female) (m)other to an object would be one defense against feeling the inevitable shame of this transition, and can be seen as a common thread in the myriad varieties of sexisms and "repudiations of femininities," as Butler, Benjamin, Chodorow among many others have argued.)
The core memory of shame is inevitable in therapy due to the inevitability of feeling small, dependent, vulnerable, and weak in comparison with the potentially sublime (awesome, traumatic) phantasy figure of the early Mother (Other), and the importance of this fantasy (m)other figure in shaping the foundations of our psychology. Being in the lower position of a necessary hierarchy as an adult would inevitably lead to some kind of regression to or activation of this memory. That is, unless the student or patient is somehow completely analyzed, which we know, and Freud's essay argues (220), is impossible.
The inevitable resistance to therapy would then connect to one’s inevitable resistances to being a student or to being governed. These resistances to being a "subject" are the common regressive thread running through the potentially impossible professions: we resist feeling small, dependent, and vulnerable to more powerful (m)others, and therefore to feeling shame.
Difference also comes into play here as the mother’s innate difference/separateness causes anxiety that gets expressed as resistance within therapy, usually in the form of concreteness, as Alan Bass's two books argue so well (2000, 2006; see also Anders, 2007). Connecting Bass to Chodorow, Butler, and Benjamin, I locate the source of regressive shame in the primary difference unconsciously registered between the nascent, hyper-dependent self and (m)other, who is fantasized to be all-powerful and whole—and therefore see the potential for shame in any regression, and especially in those engendered in necessary hierarchies.
Relation necessarily requires an exceedingly complex negotiation of difference, shame, destruction, etc. As such, relation should be understood as an accomplishment, a product of growth and health, and never be assumed as a given, especially in unformed egos.
Concreteness, narcissistic projections, and domination-aggression would be the products of the disavowal of difference where relation is not achieved. Without an appreciation of these dynamics, the potential pitfalls of therapy and supervision would be lost to view. The SSP teaches these pitfalls (if not this theorization of them) despite its allegiance to a theoretical body of work, relational psychoanalysis, that generally assumes that relation is primary, a given.
An example of my own defensive stance at the start of the SSP was my initial belief that the "teach" and the "treat" aspects of supervision should be kept separate: an initial belief probably too well known to my teachers and colleagues. By the end of the program, it became clear to me that I was using this theory of a simplified teach-treat dichotomy defensively, attempting to ward off the overwhelming complexity and difference of what might be called simply “more aware” supervision, or supervision that recognizes the necessity of hierarchies, and of the unconscious as part of the process for all involved.
I eventually was able to see that there is no pure or ideal teach or treat: They are always blended together, and hopefully mixed with learning and receiving outside treatment. I now see that there is no one or final answer to the teach-treat dilemma, and that it has to stay a dilemma interminably for supervision to work as well as it can. The only final answer is that teach-treat is interminable: teach-treat is just one dilemma of supervision and therapy that requires a sustained "negative capability," as Keats might say. Supervisees have not entrusted supervisors to treat them, yet teaching therapy requires an awareness of oneself, an awareness of countertransference, an inclusion of unconscious processes, to the point that supervision fails if it does not somehow include these psychoanalytic elements, and if the supervisor does not find some pedagogical way to use them.
This is where much of the art of supervision has to happen, and art does not lend itself to final answers or dichotomies.
It is the traditional Western defense to turn overwhelming complexity into a simplistic dichotomy. As a beginning supervisor confronting the "impossibility cubed" of the SSP, and holding a "classical" torch of a simplified teach-treat dichotomy and supervisory frame, I needed to be "treated" for this defense and others. We all should feel small with respect to the interminable "impossibility cubed" of our profession as therapists and teachers of therapy--and, of course, we should all work with our own therapists on keeping these feelings from activating overwhelming shame, and from impinging on ourselves, our students, or our patients. The "dangers of analysis."
My SSP succeeded in teaching and containing much of the anxiety associated with the blended "teach/treat" and the "impossibility cubed" of a necessarily three-tiered program dealing with teaching, therapy, and the "dangers of analysis," while also practicing and encouraging the essential Keatsian negative capability, i.e., the necessary humility that such a program and such a combination of professions requires.
By focusing on the inevitability of countertransference (and how to use it), shame, and the parallel process of teaching tiers, the SSP was able to teach this necessary humility without being shaming and while holding the program’s own authority.
Much of the thanks for this teaching and containing goes to my individual consultant, Sherry Crandon, and my class's group consultant, Judy Green, who were both able to model excellent supervision while also laying the groundwork for the student supervisors to take whatever personal issues came up to our own therapists. Judy's skill as a group consultant helped us to move from a collection of anxious individuals to a "good enough" functioning and supportive group, which we all learned was an essential part of our individual experiences. Through hard work, patience, and negative capability, my SSP class ended up being able to help each other as peers within the context of a containing group.
So, once again, thank you to my classmates Lynn Winsten, Jennifer Sterling, and Catherine Cheyette for an amazing two years. I know all of my classmates would want me to extend their thanks to their individual consultants, listed respectively to the names above: Lynn Franco, Joan Cole, and Margaret Skinner. An amazing and transformative two years indeed: rebus bene gestis, as Freud might say. Very intense and difficult, but also very possible and with a practical ending. The training has terminated and yet we have learned from it the interminability—and deep possibilities—of our work as psychoanalytic therapists and teachers of psychoanalytic therapy. Thank you TPI.
Anders, Eric. 2000. Disturbing Origins: A Derridean Reading of Freudian Theory. Dissertation. University of Florida. www.eric.anders.net/dissertation.
-----. 2007. Psychoanalysis and Difference: Alan Bass's Generalization of Fetishism. Journal of European Psychoanalysis, no. 24, pp. 165-190.
Bass, Alan. 2003. Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
-----. 2006. Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York, New York: Pantheon Books.
-----. 2000. Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1: 291-308.
Butler, J. (2000). Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1:27.
Freud, S. (1937). Analysis Terminable and Interminable. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937-1939): 209-254.
-----. (1938). Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1920-1922): 271-278.
Malcolm, J. (1981).Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. New York, New York: Vintage Books.
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