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Interpretive Community, Intersubjective Experiences, and Supervisees’ Paradoxes
Author(s) -
Yerushalmi Hanoch
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
british journal of psychotherapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.442
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1752-0118
pISSN - 0265-9883
DOI - 10.1111/bjp.12542
Subject(s) - psychology , similarity (geometry) , epistemology , meaning (existential) , context (archaeology) , construct (python library) , point (geometry) , uniqueness , social psychology , psychotherapist , paleontology , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , image (mathematics) , biology , programming language
Contemporary theorists believe that each expert's discourse has meaning only in the context of an interpretive community. For therapists, the analytic community serves this purpose, helping them to construct their patients’ experiences and to hold inherent intersubjective paradoxes; the community provides them with a vantage point from which they learn to acknowledge, tolerate, and accept these paradoxes. I will examine the role of this vantage point in holding one of the central paradoxes for therapists: the uniqueness of each therapeutic relationship which urges them to ‘reinvent psychoanalysis’ with each patient, and its similarity to other therapeutic relationships which urges them to draw on the analytic community's theoretical schemas. I will suggest that supervisors help their supervisees in this internal struggle by representing the analytic community's vantage point and by holding a parallel paradox: the uniqueness of each supervisory relationship, which urges them to ‘reinvent’ the theory of supervision for each supervisee, and its similarity to other supervisory relationships, which urges them to draw on the analytic community's theoretical supervisory schemas. Reasonably, the supervisors’ capacity to hold these paradoxes is gradually internalized by their supervisees, facilitating their growth as therapists.