Your Supervisor is Always Wrong

Don’t get me wrong, supervision is very important. I’ve been supervising for a few years and always find it a privilege to be involved in the shared process of thinking about a client. In music therapy we have this unique ingredient of listening back to audio or watching video. It doesn’t happen often enough, usually for logistical reasons, but when it does it can throw new light on the work. We can also make suggestions about what to do musically, based on our musical impressions of the client. ‘You could try matching the pulse here’, ‘perhaps the client would respond to your voice’, ‘try playing a bit less; wait to hear what the client does with the silence’. There’s an imaginative process where the supervisor tries to get a sense of the client, probably picturing them a certain way, thinking about what it might be like to be with them. There might be some elements of role play in supervision. Sometimes I might imagine what I would say to a client, and say this, in the tone of voice I might use, so that the supervisee gets an idea of what I’m driving at, of the affect as well as the intention.

As a supervisee I usually feel these moments, when the supervisor imagines what they might do with this client, making suggestions or acting out a scenario, to be off the mark. I almost always think, to some extent, ‘No you haven’t quite got it’, or even ‘Seriously? That’ll never work’. This is such a consistent thing, with every supervisor, that it’s either about me (always possible – maybe I just hate getting advice) or about the process of supervision. Winnicott has this to say: “What matters to the patient is not the accuracy of the interpretation so much as the willingness of the analyst to help, the analyst’s capacity to identify with the patient”, and perhaps this applies to supervision as well, since we are mirroring something about the therapeutic process.

I’ve had these experiences in peer supervision too. One sticks in my mind, when I was describing a client who would go running out of the therapy room, and a colleague suggested singing about this, reflecting the client’s actions in the music. This seemed so far-fetched in relation to this young man that it was almost comical. I tried to imagine his reaction if I started singing ‘You’re running out of the room’ in a light baritone, perhaps with a Schubertian accompaniment – ludicrous! But perhaps there was something useful about the process. Imagining what my client might do with a certain response put me back in the room for a moment. The incongruity of the suggestion helped to highlight something, even if it was just that this client might not be someone who would respond to sung reflection. Generally, of course, it’s not such a far-out idea. With some clients, particularly younger children, singing about what they’re doing can make a useful connection. With this person the idea threw his personality into sharp relief. There was no way he would connect with this approach, but it was useful to think about why.

When the supervisor ‘gets it wrong’, this is really an important part of their job. Perhaps as a supervisor myself I’m looking for a get-out clause, but as a supervisee I can feel the helpfulness of this idea. As well as providing a sort of reverse image of the client (is this akin to Bion’s ‘intense beam of darkness’, helping to support our negative capability?) it also reminds me that the supervisor is with me now, but in the session I’m on my own with the client. I can get support, but the clinical work is still my responsibility. Furthermore it emphasises the time differential. In supervision you are either imagining yourself back into the past or projecting yourself into the future. What could I have done? What did this mean? How could I respond next time? Anything the supervisor says, to state the obvious, they are saying now, in supervision. If you try to freeze-frame and carry this forward into the next session it probably won’t work. Bion again – ‘without memory or desire’ – including the desire to implement suggestions from supervision. Listen to your supervisor, absorb their words, experience the containment, then forget about it all, clear your head, and do the next session.