Being There

Abstract

This article was written in response to receiving the 2012 Eric Berne Memorial Award for the author’s work on supervision. It underscores the value of theoretical knowledge of supervision for all practitioners, even those not directly involved in offering supervision. It also provides a practical approach to the analysis of the relational dynamics in both supervision and clinical practice through three questions practitioners might ask themselves: What am I feeling during the session? Why do I feel what I am feeling? Why does the other person want (unconsciously) me to feel what I am feeling? The use of these questions is described and illustrated through two case studies.

• supervision
• self-supervision
• transference
• countertransference
• relational transactional analysis
• relational process
• relational field

Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Mazzetti

Author Biography

Marco Mazzetti, MD, is a psychiatrist; a Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (psychotherapy); a member of EATA and the ITAA since 1988; a university lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Brescia, Italy; and the author of several books and scientific articles on transactional analysis. He is the head of the rehabilitation service for torture victims at Invisible Wounds at the Caritas Health Service in Rome. Marco is the didactic director of the master’s degree in psychotherapy at the Turin Institute of Transactional Analysis (ITAT) and works in private practice as a trainer, psychotherapist, counselor, and organizational consultant in Milan, Italy, where he founded and runs the Milan Institute for Transactional Analysis. Marco can be reached at Via Nicastro, 7, 20137 Milan, Italy; email: [email protected]. The author is grateful to Charlotte Sills for her observations and feedback on this article and for her generous, clever, and brilliant editing, which improved it enormously.