Three Associating: Adventures in Relational Psychoanalytic Supervision: Recent Episodes
Gill Straker, Rachael Burton, Andrew Geeves
Three Associating is a podcast that offers the listener a peek behind the closed doors of therapists working within a relational psychoanalytic model. Join Rachael and Andrew as they explore with their supervisor Gill how their own hidden feelings and motivations influence the therapeutic process and affect their patients. In each episode, a relational dilemma arising in the context of work with a fictitious patient is explored. While reasons of confidentiality and privacy mean that none of the patients we discuss are real, the relational dynamics are.
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In this episode, Andrew surprises himself by the degree to which his patient has led him into dissociating from his own inner subjectivity and into merging with the patient's agenda. This agenda, in turn, reflects the patient's merged state with his partner so that “two become one”.
Andrew is able to use supervision to take up a third position and to take a perspective which frees him to use his own thoughts, thereby helping the patient shape his own subjectivity independently of his partner.
In this episode, Rachael approaches the taboo of sexual attraction in therapy and its tendency to lead to dysregulation, involuntary self-disclosure, and shame.
Rachael's feelings unduly amplify her self-consciousness, complicating the ongoing therapeutic task of understanding her and her patient's contribution to the co-construction of their relational field.
After engaging Rachael in a discussion of the reality/fantasy divide and the difference between voluntary and involuntary self disclosure, Gill invites a recourse to theory both as a stabilising force in the choppy waters of the embodied and as a way of retaining the boundaries of supervision versus therapy.
In this episode it becomes clear that Andrew and his patient Manuela are unconsciously co-constructing a dynamic in which Manuela is under pressure to be cultured and cool in order to maintain Andrew's admiration, while Andrew is under pressure to take up a lesser position. As the supervision unfolds, Andrew becomes aware of how his envy is at the heart of this dynamic and how he is projecting certain longings onto Manuela. He becomes aware this leads to both an underplaying of Manuela’s limits and vulnerabilities and the overplaying of his own and keeps her stuck in a relational impasse. In the session, Andrew moves to a more balanced perception of Manuela’s plight and a greater recognition of his own contribution to her relational dynamic.
Rachael comes to realise that feeling provoked by the patient’s apparent self-centredness in enactments that occur in the waiting room and in the session has led to a wish to be provocative in return. She first enjoys then tussles with revenge fantasies. By talking through these fantasies and owning their pleasure, she recognises their meaning, and this opens up multiple perspectives.
In this episode, Rachael encounters a worthy adversary in the elegant and charismatic Iris. Beguiled by Iris charm and colourful stories Rachael can’t help feeling seduced. However she also feels manipulated and is irritated with herself and Iris. Nevertheless she still feels the pull to captivation in the session. In the end, Rachael realises that the most worthy adversary that she has is herself and in freeing herself contemplates helping Iris to be both her charismatic and her vulnerable self.
In this episode, Andrew struggles to disrupt his patient's rigid self-control, ever mindful of a psychotic potential that could be unleashed given the patient's history of experiencing a psychotic episode. Andrew experiences both the seductions of a meeting of minds and the potential tyranny of his patient's mind that fears the body, its appetites, and affects.
In this episode, Rachael is provoked by a disrupted patient. Power struggles and challenges emerge in the room as Rachael struggles to think and not enact in the face of the patient's enactments. Technical questions of courageous speech versus disruptive challenges are engaged as Rachael shows great integrity and courage in taking in the challenges of supervision to come to an expanded understanding of trauma.
In this episode, Andy is frustratingly blocked by his patient's difficulty in listening and by her incessant talking, both of which reveal parts of her self and mask others. Ironically, Andy himself has to surrender into listening rather than talking and into only having recognised small snippets of his thoughts, if any at all. He becomes aware of the deprivation under his patient's excess and how this fuels the discrepancy between her subjective reality and his experience of her.
In this episode, we encounter Rachael's struggle with an avoidant patient who is fearful of closeness. Rachael is conflicted between her desire for the patient to make progress and to stay present to the work and to 'dine in', and her awareness that, for his desire to move forward to emerge, she needs to take a step back and let him continue with 'take away' for a while longer.
In this episode, Andrew finds himself challenging his patient's perception of him as an internet dinosaur, too old to be familiar with youth culture. In engaging this challenge, Andrew finds both a way to connect with his patient, but also a way to collude to avoid an underlying grief which needs to be addressed.
In this episode, Rachael struggles with exasperation and grief as she writes a court report for a patient who has relapsed. To be both truthful and helpful is no mean feat, and nor is accepting the limits of her responsibility while still grappling with how to move the therapy forward.
In this episode, Andrew, Gill, and Rachael explore the hot topic of neurodiversity. We conclude that whatever the political and ideological controversies, our main focus needs to be on the person in the room.
Misrecognition and the projection of others are a perennial problem, but perhaps more so for those who are queer identified. But whoever is at the receiving end of mistaken identity, the effects are very unpleasant as Gill, Andrew, and Rachael come to know first hand in this episode.
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In this episode, Gill, Rachael, and Andrew grapple with feelings of exposure as Rachael becomes aware that her private and professional lives have collided, but the exact nature of this is unknown.
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Rachael, Gill, and Andrew work together to understand how the presence of subtle power dynamics, unconsciously enacted in the therapeutic relationship, are signalled by the therapist’s destructive fantasy.
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In this episode, Gill, Andrew, and Rachael are confronted with how intense feelings can muddy the waters and produce confusion about which feelings belong to the therapist and which to the patient.
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In this episode, Rachael, Andrew, and Gill discuss the proverbial notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions as Rachael's wish to protect the patient reveals hidden difficulties.
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In this episode, Andrew, Rachael and Gill tussle together over ethical and therapeutic issues as they wonder where self help ends and where helping oneself to what belongs to the other begins.
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Rachael, Gill, and Andrew struggle hard to resist the all-too-human desire for magical solutions to truly awful problems.
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In the first episode of season two, Gill, Andrew and Rachael plunge into the pleasures and perils of toxic masculinity and the allure of trading intimacy and authenticity for the exercise of power.
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In this last episode of season one, Gill, Rachael, and Andrew grapple with the challenges of staying awake when it seems that the other person is exaggerating wildly or, even worse, is somewhat out of touch with reality. Faced with the seemingly impossible task of finding a constructive way to express one’s thoughts to the person, it is easy to unconsciously zone out instead.
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Gill, Andrew, and Rachael wrestle with the thorny issues of rivalry and competition. They show how, ironically, being caught in rivalry can lead one to give away one’s authority, as the focus comes to be placed on competing rather than on occupying one’s own personal power.
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Gill, Andrew, and Rachael encounter the common problem of when we are drawn in by charisma, fail to set firm boundaries and then experience guilt and anxiety about hurting the other person when we feel our boundaries have been transgressed.
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Gill, Rachael, and Andrew dive into the heady brew of sex and aggression, showing how these issues can be unconsciously provoked and can then easily lead to shame and overwhelm.
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Gill, Andrewand Rachael uncover some unexpected disadvantages of friendliness, delving into how affability can cover up an unconscious fear of difference and otherness, and also mask a desire to be mirrored back positively to oneself.
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Gill, Andrew and Rachael discover how unconscious disapproval can be communicated with ill effect and provoke bullying and verbal intimidation in return, resulting in overwhelm, dissociation, and an inability to think.
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Gill, Andrew and Rachael come to understand how an unconscious bias towards over-identifying with a person's trauma story inadvertently deprives the person of agency and disallows a more nuanced perception of the person.
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Gill, Rachael, and Andrew explore the common problem of feeling conflicted between a wish to be accepting and the desire to be confronting of offensive stances and statements. They come to recognise how understanding one's own unconscious biases contributes to the solution.
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