Clinical Mentorship: One More Aspect of Feminist Supervision

ABSTRACT

There has been very little written about clinical mentorship from within the field of family therapy, let alone within the feminist family therapy training literature. Prior to this study, research was too sparse to know whether mentoring relationships were indeed a part of feminist-informed clinical training relationships within family therapy. However, this study's participants reported that mentorship was indeed important and described three facets: providing guidance, managing power within the relationship, and empowering therapists to professionally self-define. Because of the lack of writing about mentorship in family therapy training, the authors decided it important to immerse themselves within the literature of sister disciplines, using several feminist-informed mentorship models. As they have done so, the discussion of the results, and the feminist family therapy supervision literature in general, have provided a wider context and are enlivened and enriched by these sister disciplines' ideas about mentorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate student mentorship
• family therapy supervision
• feminist supervision
• family therapy training
• clinical mentorship
• power dynamics
• professional socialization

Notes

Kram, K. E. (1988). Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organizational life. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Published previously as Kram, K. E. [1985]. Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organizational life. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman.)