Conviction, commonality/context, and culture in psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervision: My personal perspective

Abstract

I subsequently summarize the quintessentials of my talk, “Core Quintessentials of Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Supervisory Thought and Action: In Three Parts”, presented to the British Association for Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Supervision, 8 October 2022. I give focus to three ever fundamental, foundational areas: (a) the anchoring convictions that ground my supervisory perspective (the supervision foundation upon which I stand); (b¹) my search to identify the crucial commonalities that animate my own supervisory practice and perhaps bind us all together as supervisors (a common factors, common processes, common practices perspective); and (b²) my complementary effort to accordingly propose an explanatory framework within which those binding commonalities could be situated (the Contextual Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Supervision Relationship Model); and (c) my struggle to work at forever making culture an integral part of who I am, how I think, and how I act as a supervisor (striving to incorporate a multicultural orientation into my practice and bring the Cultural Third to life). I offer these personal sharings, my personal perspective (along with perspective-consistent references), in hopes of stimulating further reader reflection, dialogue, and conversation about these core matters of quintessential psychoanalytic/psychodynamic supervisory importance.

Keywords:

• Supervision
• psychoanalytic
• psychodynamic
• common factors
• cultural third

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.