Race and culture in contemporary psychodynamic supervision

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there have been significant strides towards an improved understanding of race and culture in clinical supervision. Yet, there continues to be less attention directed towards the influence of the contemporary sociocultural context on the lives of supervisees and supervisors. This manuscript explores how race and culture are experienced in supervision amidst ongoing sociocultural traumas and injustice. In particular, I highlight how the key features of psychoanalytic supervision have recently been expanded to include attention to sociocultural dynamics, and then examine how the contemporary sociopolitical context has specific impacts on the lives of supervisees and supervisors. I also underscore the importance of centring the experiences of racial minority supervisees and supervisors, which have remained less visible within scholarship concerning psychodynamic clinical supervision. In an effort to expand prior theorising on racial and cultural dynamics in supervision , I propose further attention to the following areas in psychodynamic supervision: 1) role of unconscious relational processes (e.g. transference, countertransference, and parallel process); 2) the influence of external realities; and 3) the role of vulnerability and humility. The manuscript is a call for a collective mission to integrate race and culture in psychodynamic supervision.