Supervisees’ professional development and the analytic community

Abstract

Children construct their inner worlds by internalizing real and imagined aspects of their parental figures and their families as whole objects with their relational configurations. These familial configurations are often evoked in the context of communities that, similarly to families, struggle to preserve and advance their unity and collective values, interests, and symbols. Supervisees acknowledge their internalized familial relational configurations when they explore their countertransferences and their transferential responses to the analytic community. Understanding these transferences in supervision may facilitate the process of assimilating the analytic community into supervisees’ professional selves. Moreover, the supervisors represent and mediate both the community’s balanced and flexible relational therapeutic positions and its complexities. These positions might provide the supervisees with new group-object experiences and change their defensively organized rigid familial relational configurations, thereby further integrating the supervisees’ professional selves as well as strengthening the analytic community.