On the Supervisee's Future Orientation

Abstract

While exploring the supervisee's implicit contribution to therapeutic interactions, the supervisor can focus on the supervisee's future orientation instead of exploring transference manifestations that might arouse the supervisee's anxiety. I suggest that future orientation is shaped by an implicit urge described in the analytic literature as an unconscious hope to elicit yearned‐for psychological nutrients from the environment. In parallel, existentialist literature describes an urge to exercise the freedom to live an authentic life and actualize fundamental personal projects, sometimes against cultural and societal convictions and conventions. Furthermore, frustrating the urge that shapes future orientation might lead to a limited situational crisis described differently by the two schools of thought. While reconstructing the supervisee's therapeutic experiences, the supervisor can discern this urge in the components or response patterns of the supervisee's situational crisis. I will suggest that the supervisory dyad's capacity to formulate the implicit urge that shapes the supervisee's future orientation creates a continuous temporality and enlivens the supervisory and therapeutic processes.