On Lacan and Supervision: A Matter of Super‐Audition

Abstract

Supervision is crucial to most forms of talking therapy. This article focuses on psychoanalysis and explores how supervision can be conceptualized from a Lacanian point of view. We discuss two principal ideas about supervision from Lacan's work: making the analyst sensitive to the symbolic component of the unconscious and becoming sensitive to the interrelation between language and jouissance. These ideas comprise two stages that Lacan discerned in the process of supervision: the ‘stage of the rhino’ and the ‘stage of the pun’. We illustrate Lacan's distinction between these stages by means of vignettes of analysts who were supervised by Lacan. We argue that an additional third stage should be discerned, concerning the challenge of incarnating the position of the so‐called object a. Last, we discuss the pitfalls that an analyst might experience when conducting and directing the analytic work, namely the consistency of the imaginary, the delusion of the symbolic and the real of the body.