Utilizing Reflected Countertransference: Applying the Reflection Process as a Teaching Tool in Supervision

Abstract

There are times when teaching cannot proceed through the abstract presentation of content and must progress by the demonstration of what is to be taught. This is true whenever a student is unable, for whatever reason, to appropriately apply such abstract material to the concrete task before him. This may be due to a number of factors, one of the most common of which is the lack of qualitatively similar experiences to which to refer. The teaching of complicated processes such as psychotherapy is an example, especially when the trainee is relatively unsophisticated and/or seems unable to abstract from discussion of blocking phenomena, where it may become necessary to "act in" the feeling tones which are to be the cues for the behaviour to be learned, instead of persisting with abstract interpretations. When, in supervision, a supervisee recreates the conditions existing in the therapeutic situation, this procedural behaviour is called the "Reflection Process". This process often appears to be unconsciously motivated by the need of the supervisee to solicit from the supervisor a practical demonstration which he does not know how to solicit otherwise. Even if the Reflection Process is due mainly to unresolved, unconscious conflicts of the supervisee, it can be a useful clue as to what transference-countertransference problems he is having difficulties with. The fact that such behaviour on the part of the supervisee may arise out of unresolved unconscious conflictual material should not become a reason for dismissing it. Instead, supervisors should become proficient at recognizing the countertransferential feelings in themselves, which can be an accurate reflection of the feelings troubling the supervisee in his dealings with this patient; and they should recognize the distress signal on the part of the supervisee, which can often be responded to constructively. In the supervision, the supervisor at times can, almost unwittingly, come to play the role which the supervised therapists plays in the supervised therapy and, if not aware of the Reflector Process, he may not realize that the countertransferential feelings which underly his assuming that role may not be primarily a response to the character of the therapist he is supervising but rather to that of the patient. They may also be a reflection of the process problem in the supervised therapy. It is not essential that this process be labeled in the supervision; what is essential is that its ramifications be recognized by the supervisor.