Foreword: Supervision in Gestalt Practice

As coordinators of Part Two of this special issue focused on supervision in Gestalt practice, we hope that the series of articles presented on the topic will contribute to its development and cultivation. We are grateful to Gestalt Review for this opportunity, as we see supervision as an essential support for psychotherapists. Although supervision is widely practiced in our modality and required as a fundamental support in the training programs and in long-life clinical practice, there is still little theoretical and research reflection. It is, indeed, an essential and indispensable element for the profession of psychotherapist, but it is partly unexplored and unregulated by professional communities. Not all countries have clear training standards for supervision trainings and transparent standards that define how psychotherapeutic practice should be conducted under supervision.For example, in the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT), there have been standards for training supervisors for over fifteen years, and supervision is part of the deontological duties of the psychotherapist, as defined in the code of ethics of the association since its foundation. On the other hand, in Italy, the first European country to have enacted a law regulating psychotherapy in 1989, supervision is mandatory in the training of psychotherapists, but the need for supervision after qualification is not prescribed. It is, therefore, an essential element in clinical practice, but it does not always have a corresponding recognition in the rules of psychotherapeutic communities or a corresponding literature of theory and research.In the European context, training for supervisors has spread predominantly in the past twenty years and is therefore still a new horizon to be explored, conceptualized, and shared. It is no coincidence that the EAGT training standards for supervision are constantly being revised. In some ways, we are all beginners in this area. Like psychotherapy, supervision is also a process of great complexity. And like any complex phenomenon, it lends itself to infinite angles of research, understanding, and practice. We know from research that a significant number of psychotherapies do not produce a benefit for the patient. On the contrary, they can worsen patients (see Dandachi, Otgaar, and Merckelbach 2022). There is, therefore, no doubt that the therapeutic process requires a third party to help manage the affective intensity and complexity involved. There is no doubt that supervision provides such a third party for the patient–therapist dyad.All of that said, this opens up countless questions:We raise these questions at the beginning not because we have the ambition to provide answers. We do not even think it is so necessary to provide answers. Rather, we think it is important to let ourselves be questioned in order to grasp—perhaps—how many elements of this process we often take for granted, thus risking losing their complexity, their richness, their potential.We mention these questions, therefore, as a gateway and background to delve into the articles that follow. These were born during the training for supervisors coorganized by the International Institute for Gestalt Therapy and Psychopathology (Ipsig) and Gestalt Studia (GS), which together gave birth to the Turin School of Psychopathology. In this training, we have discovered the wealth of experience and knowledge that trainees bring to us and to the training process. We have encouraged trainees to share it and are proud that some of them do so here. We share these works because we believe that only the dialogical work of the therapeutic community as a whole can create good clinical practices in an infinite process of creation and revision, of mutual learning and teaching. Some of the aforementioned questions approach supervision from a broader perspective in the context of the professional community. Others open a more intimate perspective on supervision that brings us closer to therapists and their daily practice. What exactly happens in that moment when therapists say to themselves: “Well, I think I need supervision. It would be fine to discuss this case with someone.” What brings them into supervision, even far beyond the mandatory hours?We would certainly welcome much more information on this topic; however, one common motivation seems to be a recurring sense of some stagnation or immobilization in therapy, accompanied by tension and a lack of natural flow and vitality. “I can’t move . . . I don’t know what to do . . . I can’t understand . . . I don’t feel . . . and so on.” The origin of this stagnation may be related to the too-high (too-low) intensity of a certain phenomenon or influence, which is significantly disproportionate to the actual capacity of the contact-boundary. We can understand relative capacity in the context of a person, a relationship, or a situation. What support can supervision bring to a colleague experiencing this kind of difficulty? Although supervision is commonly understood as a process, quite often it is also intuitively defined as a space: “a safe space for experiencing and experimenting” (Yontef 1996, 92); “a place of trust” (Johnson 2003, 127); “protected time for reflection” (Bond and Holland 1998, 48); and so on.The authors of the following articles show us various ways we can begin to create a safe, inspiring, and vital supervisory space that allows us to explore difficult topics more closely, relieve excessive pressure if needed, and increase the capacity for accepting and processing. This is a space where difficult experiences can be transformed; vitality and the natural flow of the therapeutic process can be restored. Supervisors can maneuver within this space in various ways. They can choose the path of acceptance and relational safety, which can in turn support this capacity within the patient–therapist dyad. They can bring the vitality of curiosity and exploration into supervision or release cognitive functioning by offering new perspectives of understanding. They can influence the field by modifying their own embodied being and conscious presence. We hope it will not sound like a cliché when we say that the authors of these articles also remind us, gently, that supervision is not only about skills and experience but also about love and life support.It is worth repeating here the importance of the relational aspects of supervision, that is, the respect, reciprocity, and deep understanding that exist between therapist and supervisor. Even more than in the role of trainer, those in the role of supervisor have the task of being humble and listening. It is not about showing off expertise and knowledge, nor about solving the case or stepping in to take the place of our colleague. It is about grasping the request, the need of the therapist, expressed verbally or present in the background; a need that also reflects and includes the patient’s needs. Even more than in the role of therapist, we are thus called to put aside all our knowledge and transform it into what is useful in the here and now. Even when the therapist chooses the supervisor based on specific skills (e.g., relational theory, field theory, psychopathology, or attention to the body), those same skills can be more background than figure in the meeting. Supervision, even more than psychotherapy, opens new paths by remaining in the essential and clearing out the superfluous: supervisor, therapist, patient, context, figure, background, and here and now. That is all.Something important we have considered in the writing of this foreword, and which emerges in the subsequent articles in this issue, is the almost opposite and polar aspects to what we are saying. Experience tells us that in our time, supervision is becoming more and more complex and almost diverging from itself. Supervision, which was born in psychotherapy as a specific intervention of clinical support, increasingly becomes a support for therapists who are trying to orient themselves in the complexity of an evolving world in which their role and social mandate are less and less clear and defined as a priori. The plurality of voices in this text also serves to open a door into this complexity.What will you find in this issue? There is a lot more going on in the supervision process than just clinical case consultation. The supervisor plays an important role in the psychotherapist’s maturation process. The article by Anna Malecka and Olga Tokarska-Bak, “Building a Safe Ground in Supervision: Work with Beginner Therapists,” focuses on the relational aspect of supervision during the fragile period of building self-support in novice therapists. Based on their survey, they introduce us to what we, as supervisors, can do to build safe ground and support the process of therapists’ individuation.Supervision can tempt us to focus attention on the case presented. In their article, “Wonder as a Gateway to Oistros in Supervision,” Exarmenia Pappa and Inge Van Droogennbroeck remind us of the importance of paying attention to ourselves, the supervisors, as well. They highlight the need to support oneself in the position of supervisor, and they bring us a beautiful example of how to do this: by letting ourselves be amazed. The authors introduce us to a theoretical framework and show specific ways to support our curiosity and even our passion for our work as supervisors.In his article, “Perspectives within the Gestalt Modality and Supervision,” Martin Černý draws attention to the importance of the theoretical position from which we approach supervision work. He distinguishes four perspectives to which we, as Gestalt supervisors, can turn: monopersonal perspective, bipersonal perspective, apersonal perspective, and beyond-personal perspective. He describes and illustrates with examples the ways in which the theoretical position of the supervisor will influence the supervision process.How to be present as a supervisor? Antonia Konstantinidou, in her article, “Supporting Presence in Gestalt Supervision,” addresses this question by considering the supervisory process from the perspective of field theory. She guides us through the aesthetically perceived key moments of supervision and shows us how we can recognize them through the resonances of our own lived experiences. She highlights the importance of the quality of our own presence in such moments.We conclude with a text on the process of becoming a supervisor. Jan Roubal, Stanislava Dudová, and Daniel Karásek, in “Supporting Growth of Gestalt Supervisors in Training,” describe the role of trainers in training supervisors, with an emphasis on using a didactic approach to create a collaborative and less hierarchical learning atmosphere. They show how it is possible to support the creation of one’s own supervision style in training.