Au contraire . . . A reply to Claire Bacha’s response to ‘The ethics of supervision’

I feel compelled to reply to your strong response, as you (Claire Bacha), appear to have misunderstood and misconstrued much of what I was trying to say, and in doing so, have misrepresented both, me, as well as the thrust of my argument.

But as you have ‘outed yourself’ in declaring that it is you that uses the term ‘deskilling’ and think it to be a virtue, it becomes clear that you inhabit the exact controlling authoritarian position that I am questioning and challenging in my piece.

The very fact that you own up to inhabiting this position, shows that my characterizations of the classical analyst is not the ‘straw man’ that you declare it to be (Bacha, 2021), but a concrete and substantial living breathing being as embodied by you yourself. I say this on the basis of the declarations and assertions you have made in your response.

You declare that I put before the reader ‘only polarized views from which to choose one’, these being either that of science or intersubjective activity. I find this somewhat bewildering because in this and other pieces, I have been advocating that we get need to ‘get back to the rough ground’ (Dalal, 2018).

It seems to me that in your response you are not offering the reader even the choice between two positions, but only one view, your view of group analysis, a view that is full of certainty. This way of proceeding makes group analysis out to be a kind of fundamentalist religion that brooks no alternatives.

For example, when you say that ‘psychoanalytic therapy goes only one way, and thus the supervision tends to go one way as well’ (Bacha, 2021). This is the very position that I am challenging, this being the authoritarian stance which you seem to embody through your response; you are the one that knows, and the supervisee is the one that does not know and cannot know, until you have taught them to know, and most importantly, taught them what to know. This is further exemplified when you say ‘I welcome the critical thinking once I know that the trainee has been able to think “enough” to try out the “analytic stance”, “boundaries” and other elements of group analytic technique’ (Bacha, 2021). Here, you appear to be saying that you welcome the trainee’s thinking, but only after it accords with your thinking. What comes across in your response, is that you appear to construe of group analysis as an already established and complete body of knowledge, as though what constitutes the ‘analytic stance’, ‘boundaries’ and the like are clear and unquestionable; and being, clear can be taught ‘as is’ to the trainee.

I also need to say that I am not opposing the idea of science to that of intersubjective activity, and asking the reader to choose between them (as you claim I am). My position is not anti-science, rather it is a critique of the misapplication of the kind of science that is appropriate to the natural sciences to the human realm (I contend that this is what classical psychoanalysis does as do the group analysts who affiliate themselves with that view). I also have a critique of the normalization of the distortion and corruption of the ideal of science for ideological and monetary ends.

A way of putting it is this: are our attempts to understand intersubjectivity best described by the term ‘science’? The notion of science is not a done deal. ‘Science’ is a term that needs to be continually contested, as does the question of what is group analysis? I contend that in this task, the task of continual critical questioning of the norms, conventions and assumptions of group analysis, the novice group therapist is key.

I also think that you might have misunderstood the notions of mutuality and reciprocity—at least in the way that I use the terms. I say this because you charge me as having confused mutuality and reciprocity with equality. I think that I have made it pretty clear that the kind of reciprocity that I am alluding to ‘keeps in mind the ever present power-relations between supervisor and supervisee’ (Dalal, 2021). You then claim: ‘The therapist-patient/client relationship is neither reciprocal nor mutual. It is co-created’ (Bacha, 2021). As you have ruled reciprocity and mutuality out of the picture, I have to ask you, how then is the relationship co-created? What is taking place that constitutes ‘co-creation’?

To my mind, the meaning of reciprocity and mutuality are that communications and gestures from one party are informing those from the other, and that this is happening in both directions in the case of the dyad, and in many directions in the case of the group; and most importantly, they are happening simultaneously, not sequentially, each feeding into and transforming the other even whilst it itself is being transformed by the other. The name for this kind of process is ‘recursive’. The consequences of this kind of recursive process are that its productions are emergent. Being emergent, they are new in that they did not exist before. The author of the novel productions as such, is process itself, not the participants that constitute and contribute to the process. This is what is being co-created—something new that was not known before by either party—supervisee or supervisor. Emergence generates novelty and moves things into territories previously unknown and unmapped.

In the top-down attitude that you are advocating there is no such possibility, no novelty is generated, the supervisor does not find themselves seeing things anew. There is only the dissemination of previously established knowledge from the supervisor to the supervisee. I do not dismiss the value and necessity of this, but think it to be a shadow of what could be possible. As you say, for you the supervision process is a one way street: ‘psychoanalytic therapy goes only one way, and thus the supervision tends to go one way as well’ (Bacha, 2021).

Here are some aspects of what I mean by reciprocity and mutuality.

To my mind, I cannot ‘give’ psychotherapy without ‘receiving’ it. Whilst ‘giving’ psychotherapy I am continuously moved, challenged, through which my understanding of myself is changed and deepened. This also true of my experience of supervision. I find myself immersed in the process. Even more, notions of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ do not capture what is actually taking place.

You say that ‘Radical Foulkes is what defines group analysis as distinct from other theories of group dynamics’ (Bacha, 2021). For me, the conception of Radical Foulkes is a way of making a distinction with Orthodox Foulkes, who (in my view) is aligned with Freud and my rendition of the classical analyst. In my view, the consequences of following the radical thesis, requires a form of disciplined immersion of the therapist in the therapeutic process, rather than the detached stance that is emblematic of the classical psychoanalyst, and reproduced by many a group analyst.

There is much else that I could take issue with in your response, for example your assertions that ‘Group analysis is very far from common sense and cognitive logic’. Au contraire—I think that the practice of group analysis is indeed common sense, an expansion and a deepening of day to day common sense, but common sense it is, by which I mean that it ‘makes sense’. The problem as I see it, is the mystification of common sense, a mystification which creates a mystique, which in turn is used to cloak the analyst and the whole psychotherapeutic endeavour.

Similarly, when you say that ‘Learning something new is often a disturbing process’, it seems to me that you leave out the exciting and thrilling elements of the learning process, and in doing so align yourself with the psychoanalytic supervisor that I was critiquing in the paper, a supervisor who subscribes ‘not only to the darker vision of the human condition, but also think[s] of themselves as detached scientists dispassionately delivering treatments’.