Abstract

The experience of supervision is one of the most important parts of an analyst’s training process. In the spirit of the theory of intersubjectivity, which is considered a paradigm of psychoanalysis in the 21. century, and inspired by the paper On Psychoanalytic Supervision (2009) by Thomas H. Ogden, the following paper tries to show the experience of the process of supervision from both sides, the supervisor’s and analyst’s. The emphasis is on supervision as a joint creative play in the supervision field (compared to the creative analytic process), where the main aim is for the supervisor to help the analyst to “dream the patient into the existence”, to the level that the analyst-analyst is still unable to reach himself/herself. In spite of the fact that we always have to keep in mind all the aspects and dimensions that are necessary for good enough supervision, in this paper the focus is on a “reverie” and “dreaming” in the intersubjective relationship between supervisor and analyst. The role and use of the metaphor are of vital importance to the process. Dreaming is a basic form of thinking through which the “royal road into the unconscious” is opened, while conjoint “dreaming” of the supervisor and analyst in the setting of the supervision process formatively helps the analysts on their path to creating their own professional identity, their “own voice” of the psychoanalyst and in the end, with the most important goal and result: to help the patient through enabling the psychoanalytic process and experience to take place, to create their authentic Self and to overcome the suffering that brought them into therapy. The relationship of the supervisor and the analyst is essentially a relation between the two adults, where one of them has much more experience in psychoanalytic processes than the other, but should not be a patronizing relationship between the one “who knows” and the other “who doesn’t know”.