The Supervisory Action of Psychoanalytic Writing: A Discussion of Rachel Altstein’s “Finding Words: How the Process and Products of Psychoanalytic Writing Can Channel the Therapeutic Action of the Very Treatment It Sets Out to Describe”

Abstract

In this commentary on Rachel Altstein’s paper, “Finding Words: How the Process and Products of Psychoanalytic Writing Can Channel the Therapeutic Action of the Very Treatment It Sets Out to Describe,” I explore the circumstances surrounding the precipitous ending of her patient’s treatment. My remarks are largely focused on understanding what I term the “supervisory action” of psychoanalytic writing for Altstein, and for clinicians in general. I offer this concept as a parallel to “therapeutic action” and define it as referring to the specific ways in which one is successfully helped to understand and conduct a treatment, often through recovery of otherwise forgotten or dissociated patient–analyst content and achievement of theoretical and clinical insights.

Keywords:

• loss
• supervisory action
• termination
• writing

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Kuchuck

Steven Kuchuck, LCSW, is the Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives; Associate Editor of Routledge’s Relational Perspectives book series; Board Member, supervisor, faculty, and Co-Director of Curriculum for the training program in adult psychoanalysis at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP); and faculty/supervisor at the NIP National Training Program, the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, and other institutes. He is a contributor to and editor of Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Routledge, 2014) and The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (coedited with Adrienne Harris; Routledge, 2015).