On Supervisees’ Sense of Agency and Safety

Abstract

To be alive and maintain an analytic stance amid transference–countertransference challenges, therapists need to experience both agency and safety. Their sense of safety increases when they connect with their internal analytic community’s representations and their sense of agency increases when they disengage from these representations. When therapists maintain the dialectical tension between these positions, they can choose a third position, to move between connecting and disengaging from the internal representations, in tune with the clinical context. Supervisors help their supervisees to contain this dialectical tension by manifesting their own sense of safety and agency when taking responsibility for their failures to understand the supervisees’ and the patients’ experiences. Furthermore, supervisors help foster the supervisees’ agency and safety separately. They help foster agency by finding autonomous and spontaneous solutions to clinical issues and help foster safety by drawing on the analytic community’s knowledge, to anchor the supervisees’ intuitive discoveries in a conceptual network, and clarify and stabilize the reality and boundaries in supervised therapies.

Keywords:

• Agency
• safety
• supervision
• analytic community
• professional self