Self-Supervision: Psychodynamic Strategies invites therapists to construct ways to achieve a more extensive and effective self-awareness and develop a 'self-supervisory self.' Appealing to teachers, students, and supervisors, Dr. Marc Lubin and Dr. Jed Yalof outline a process of teaching, learning, and strengthening a self-supervisory attitude. This book highlights how self-supervision can be taught and how its practice can deepen the treatment experience as the therapist reflects and takes "second-and-third-looks" through repeated dives into the clinical material, where each successive look has the promise of insight and understanding. The processing moves from the surface of conscious thought to the integration of less conscious experiences that tie back to the clinical exchange but with a different perspective, enhanced by listening to the self-supervisory self. The authors recommend strategies through case illustrations that provide therapists with a roadmap for processing clinical exchanges while working in a diverse set of psychotherapy training contexts. This approach informs the patient-therapist-supervisor experience by describing methods for achieving a deeper and more informed self-supervisory experience. How, for example, will a therapist know that they achieved an alternative state of understanding of a complex clinical interaction when self-supervising in response to the manifest clinical material? How does the therapist articulate and describe how this shift occurred? What were the steps that led to a new perspective where a key word in a transcript review or process note triggered a series of seemingly random associations, which, when tracked in a stepwise sequence of 'a, then b, then c,' led to an elaborated and coherent narrative of what felt initially like a moment of impasse? How did the coalescence of this material illuminate not only the patient's underlying dynamics but also served to clarify aspects of the supervisory relationship that were not obvious prior to the self-supervisory activity? These are the type of questions addressed in this creative, teachable, and psychodynamically informed approach to self-supervision.
Marc Lubin, PhD, is full professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Irvine, California, with over fifty years of teaching and supervising psychotherapists as well as doctoral students. Previously, Dr. Lubin served as the first faculty chair and campus dean at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he taught psychoanalytic psychotherapy to clinical psychology doctoral students while maintaining a private practice in individual psychotherapy and consultation. Throughout his training and practice, Dr. Lubin has benefited from consistent individual and group consultation from an array of respected psychoanalysts, including Howard Bacal, MD, Bruno Bettelheim, PhD, Erik Erikson, Merton Gill, MD, and Robert Langs, MD, and Arnold Goldberg, MD, as well as many senior analytically oriented supervisors at the Austen Riggs Center. Additionally, Dr. Lubin has actively engage in self supervision throughout his clinical career working with a wide range of individual patients. This book captures several decades of Dr. Lubin's own experience of fostering therapists' self awareness in therapeutic work as well as his own processes of self supervision through teaching, practice, training and supervising. Jed Yalof, PhD, is a training and supervising and training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, and Professor Emeritus at Immaculata University, where he served as chair of the Department of Psychology and Counseling and director of the PsyD Program in Clinical Psychology for thirty years. Prior to that, he was the director of college counseling and testing services. He is in private practice in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and specializes in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, personality testing, educational evaluations, and neuropsychological assessment. Dr. Yalof also serves as the staff neuropsychologist at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Yalof authored Training and Teaching the Mental Health Professional; co-authored, with Drs. David Downing and Marc Lubin, Teaching, Training, and Administration in Graduate Psychology Programs: A Psychoanalytic Perspective; and co-edited, with Dr. Anthony Dr. Bram of Psychoanalytic Assessment, Applications for Different Settings.
