Authentic Voices in Supervision

Abstract

Analytic thinkers incorporated the significance of authenticity for human development and therapeutic processes into their theories. I suggest that, consequently, supervisors search for the supervisees’ authentic voices, often masked by unconscious rhetorical devices, and for the patients’ authentic voices hidden in the supervisees’ voices. Assuming a poetic stance for listening, which highlights the speakers’ unique use of language, beyond the lexical and the prosaic, enables supervisors to perceive and construct implicit musical patterns and symbols woven into the supervisees’ communications. This stance allows the supervisors to perceive the supervisees’ authentic voices, free from their distracting rhetoric, and to imagine the patients’ voices in the supervisees’ heads. When supervisors differentiate and integrate various perceiving and reflective modes that characterize the poetic stance, they function as identification models for the supervisees in their development as analytic therapists.