Test of Time: Review of Janet Mattinson’s: The Reflection process in casework supervision - 1975

Feelings as evidence: the meaning of mirroring

Firstly, she argues the need for practitioners and supervisors to allow themselves to engage with the complex feelings arising from work with clients, decrying the ‘keep your distance’ mode of professionalism. She describes emotional involvement as a potential source of information about the core dynamics in a case, quoting Jung’s (1931) dictum ‘You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence’.

Mattinson extends this argument into her second theme – the reflection process in supervision, the phenomenon whereby ‘the processes at work currently in the relationship between client and worker are often reflected in the relationship between worker and supervisor’ (p. 11). A dynamic is thus enacted in supervision (by the supervisee and sometimes the supervisor) that belongs to the client/worker relationship where, for a variety of reasons, it cannot be fully experienced or acknowledged. By the unconscious process of projection, it is displaced into another part of the system as if it belongs there. If the supervisor and supervisee are able to acknowledge and think about their emotional reactions and behaviour, they may thus learn something of the underlying anxieties in the case. This is significantly different from what Hawkins and Shohet (1989, p. 42) call ‘pit-head time’, that is, ‘the right to wash off the grime of the work in the boss’s time’. The task of supervision as defined by Mattinson lies rather in the search for meaning in the ‘grime’ of complex work-related feelings.

The ‘reflection process’ is more often referred to today as ‘mirroring’ or ‘parallel processing’ (though the latter seems a particularly inept term for a process whose essence is penetration and blurring between two distinct areas). Mattinson used the term ‘reflection process’ as her work extended that of the American psychoanalyst Searles (1955) who had first coined the term. Its ready confusion with the term ‘reflective practice’ may be one reason why it is the terms ‘mirroring’ or ‘parallel processing’ that have passed into common professional parlance to describe this now widely recognized phenomenon. This may partly explain why Mattinson’s book is not now widely known, despite her being the first person in Britain to write about the matter. I shall explore later other ideas as to why this seminal book is so largely ignored.

Mirroring and parallel processing are often used loosely today as catch-all terms to suggest a causal connection where any similar dynamic issues appear in different parts of a case, system or service. Mattinson would certainly have had something to say about such sloppy thinking! One of the major joys of her book is its careful attention to detail: its long case examples vividly illustrate the struggle to identify what is and what is not the mirroring dynamic and reveal failure and partial failure as well as success. Mattinson takes us on a journey with herself and her colleagues as they discovered mirroring for themselves, using tape recordings of years of case discussions to aid their self-scrutiny.

Mattinson argues against too quickly pathologizing professionals through not understanding the powerful unconscious impact of case dynamics on professional behaviour. An important kicking-off point in her thinking was experiencing how good, competent professionals could at times present their supervisory work in skewed and seemingly less than professional ways. She highlighted that to recognize a mirroring dynamic it is essential to distinguish it from the usual behaviour of a supervisee or supervisor. She goes on to address a range of issues to which the idea of mirroring gives rise, particularly the possible danger of ‘blaming the client’ for the worker’s mistakes or emotional problems, and the need to be clear about the boundary between supervision and therapy. While practitioners may well get caught up in a particular emotional drama because of some reverberating ‘hook’ in themselves, exploring the mirroring dynamic may still be the supervisor’s most effective approach to understanding the issues in the case and to helping the worker with the task. Mattinson shared the view previously expressed by Skynner (1964) that such exploration might also provide indirect help to practitioners’ personal issues, whereas direct working on their problems would clearly be outside a supervisor’s remit.

Mattinson makes only brief references to the potential downward direction of mirroring from the organization to the supervisor and from the supervisor to the practitioner. However, the concept is highly applicable to professional life amid the impact of today’s major environmental and organizational changes when, struggling for professional survival, members of all disciplines are more likely to be propelled into behaviour that enacts core organizational dynamics. The echoes of Mattinson are to be clearly heard in Armstrong’s (2004) argument that a supervisee’s behaviour in supervision increasingly needs to be recognized as information about how the agency affects the work, rather than as a sign of the individual’s pathology.

I am tempted at this point to divert into pursuing the contemporary relevance of Mattinson’s 1981 leaflet, The Deadly Equal Triangle, which developed out of the work in The Reflection Process. Once again, Mattinson introduces a novel concept into British thinking about supervision, a concept that is now widely included in writing about supervision, namely that of the triangular nature of the supervisory relationship of supervisor/supervisee/client, embodying the intrinsic tension in managing threesomes. It is a concept that has proved usefully flexible in extending thinking about supervision in its organizational context (Hughes & Olney, 2012).

Each time I re-read this book, I find something new, often thrown in almost as an aside, such as the suggestion that it needs more rather than less skill to teach a basic level of professional development. I have also come to appreciate the layout of the book, particularly the way in which the comments on the full case histories are kept till the end so that readers can do their own thinking, and the comments then refer to numbered paragraphs in the histories for easy reference. There are even summaries of the case histories for those who are interested only in the thesis.

Influence over time and current status

It is probably clear by now that for me The Reflection Process has certainly stood the test of time, but many questions need to be asked about its influence over time and its current status.

Mattinson makes it clear that her main focus is on one aspect only of supervision, but that aspect – the impact of core case dynamics on practitioners and the potential information contained in this impact – is mentioned one way or another in most writing on supervision since, regardless of theoretical approach. In some systemic thinking, such processes might be referred to as families’ attempts to draw others into expected ways of behaving and thinking, thus maintaining a status quo of familiar experience and interaction (Byng-Hall, 1988). In family therapy supervision, for example, one of the values of the observing team lies in attending to how the dynamics of a family will impact differently on those observing (Andersen, 1987; Stratton, Hanks, Campbell & Hatcher, 1993).

The literature on supervision in child protection work has been to the fore in highlighting the powerful mirroring and enactment by professionals of the core dynamics of denial and of the victim/rescuer/persecutor triangle, and has given attention to the dangers inherent in the failure to recognize and understand some professional behaviour in this way (Hughes & Pengelly, 1997; Morrison, 1991). Repeatedly, inquiry and government reports following child deaths have stressed the need for supervisory practice that attends to the information contained in mirroring. For example, a Department of Health (1991, p. 30) study of inquiry reports emphasized the importance of helping supervisors to

recognize the effect achieved by the emotions being beamed out from the family. It is also a process which enables practitioners to know themselves… The method of supervision must identify how perceptions and feelings may be affecting work done, whether between field worker and family, or field worker and supervisor.

Many other texts (e.g. Hawkins & Shohet, 1989; Winship, Harniman, Burling & Courtney, 1995; Woodhouse & Pengelly, 1991) describe how individuals and families may project different aspects of their conflicting emotions into different professionals and agencies which, if not addressed, can become amplified into serious rifts or collusions over the very cases that need the most co-operation.

Yet, despite the unquestionable relevance of the ideas Mattinson introduced into the thinking about supervision in Britain, a major question remains about her influence. In the literature on supervision across a range of disciplines, though mirroring is regularly mentioned, her seminal book is rarely referenced. Although in my opinion she describes the process of mirroring more precisely and practically than any other author, it appears that her work is not now recognized and in that sense has not stood the test of time. I have been driven to try and understand this discrepancy and have certain suggestions.

Reading the literature of supervision across disciplines and theoretical approaches, I have been struck by how little cross-referencing takes place. It seems to have diminished over the years, perhaps influenced by today’s competitive climate. A text whose strength lies in the application of ideas from one field (psychoanalysis) to another (social work) therefore falls into no neatly available category. The result of this separatist attitude can be constant rediscovering and renaming the wheel. For example, in a recent psychoanalytic article (Vollmer Filho et al, 2007) the new term ‘the supervisory field’ appears to be little different from ‘the reflection process’ but makes no reference to Mattinson or Searles. It is certainly noticeable that the literature of supervision in social work (e.g. Brown & Bourne, 1996; Pritchard, 1995) is generally more likely than that in other disciplines to quote Mattinson. I would further suggest that there might be a particular reluctance on the part of other disciplines to acknowledge that there is something to be learned from social work, whose status as a profession has certainly dipped in recent decades. It is my belief that the experience of, and writing about, supervision in social work in the seventies and eighties was in advance of those of other disciplines. Despite the sad decline of thoughtful supervision in social work in recent decades, this valuable history has recently been drawn on in the production of a document on National Occupational Standards on Supervision in Social Work and Social Care (Skills For Care, 2006), which provides a national template for supervision available for use by other professions. This lack of cross-disciplinary fertilization strikes me as a particular loss in the area of supervision, where, despite important differences related to theoretical approaches, key issues and dynamics are the same across the board.

However, other factors to do with the more recent culture of public services in Britain may also have contributed to the ‘disappearance’ of Mattinson. The literature of supervision in most disciplines, reflecting the changes in organizational life, has been increasingly preoccupied with matters of organizational accountability, assessing competence, anti-discriminatory practice and the use of authority – all matters of essential importance to supervision, but ones which Mattinson clearly stated were not her focus. The danger is that the importance of interactional dynamics has got lost amid the busy-ness and the pull towards prescriptive certainty. Mattinson’s emphasis on the need to take time to understand, on the struggle to think to avoid rushing into premature action, runs counter to a culture wherein there is a demand for speedy responses and rapid decisions. Meanwhile, many professionals work in settings or are trained in ways that overtly or covertly discourage the exploration of difficult feelings (Cooper & Lousada, 2005; Evans, 2006).

Continuing relevance

Yet practitioners and supervisors continue, of course, to experience the ‘communication by impact’ (Casement, 1985, pp. 72–73) of clients’ feelings. My experience of running courses for supervisors of all disciplines and theoretical persuasions has made it clear that supervisors readily grasp the idea that something going on in the here-and-now of a supervisory relationship might be related to the client/practitioner relationship, and can feel some relief when able to find a language that helps them to process and make sense of this. This echoes the viewpoint of Parsloe (quoted earlier) in the foreword to Mattinson’s work.

Inquiry reports into child deaths continue to extol the need for attention to be given in supervision to the feelings engendered by the work (Laming, 2003), but, as Cooper and Lousada (2005, p. 155) highlight, in their eloquent plea for emotionally intelligent policymaking, there remain serious questions as to how staff may actually be enabled to develop and sustain ‘the capacity to both endure intensity of emotional and intellectual pain and turmoil and exercise measured thought, analysis and judgement’. Mattinson’s 1975 plea for the importance of risking feeling in the service of true thought seems to me to be more relevant than ever and has certainly stood the test of time. However, ‘as we face the prospect of severe cuts in services, time for supervision, always seen as a soft option when professional diaries are under pressure, will need its defenders to be firmly positioned’ (Hughes and Olney, 2012). It may therefore take more courage and determination than ever to risk grappling in supervision with the feelings engendered by the work.