Supervision

The association Diversa/mente conducts supervision meetings aimed at psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, cultural mediators, educators, teachers and in general those who work in multicultural contexts. The supervision uses group work with particular attention to the analysis of counter-transference and cultural components.

Supervision groups were carried out with: Centro Donna Giustizia of Ferrara, project "Oltre la Strada"; Service for Refugees and Asylum Seekers of the Municipality of Venice; Spazio Giovani of Bologna; Service of Child Neuropsychiatry ASL Bologna.

Usefulness of supervision in multicultural contexts

The subjectivity of the operator - engaged in care, social and educational work, and even in scientific research - is a variable that cannot be eliminated.

The belief that interventions are neutral and objective, as they are based on the use of standardised tools, grids or rigid protocols, is a widespread illusion, especially in recent years. As George Devereux already maintained - in his 1967 text "From anxiety to method in the sciences of behaviour" - the observer of society, in the images and affections it arouses in him, cannot be external and impartial, but is continually involved in it. A continuous and renewed conscious scientific rectitude on the part of the observer, called by Devereux the ethics of encounter, is therefore necessary.

According to Devereux, the epistemological model of psychoanalysis, whose core lies in the transference-countertransference dialectic, is able to clarify the epistemological dilemmas of other disciplines dealing with human behaviour. For Devereux, the transference-countertransference interaction becomes not only a technical procedure of psychoanalysis, but a general paradigm of the observer-observer relationship in the field of human events.

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In particular, the subjectivity of the operator and his emotional reactions are brought into play when faced with situations of suffering for which there is a lack of instruments and devices suitable for understanding and processing it. When these subjective reactions (which technically psychoanalysis calls countertransference) are not recognised and remain in the solitude of the practitioner, they may act unconsciously and defensively on the representations that the practitioner makes of the user, on the operational choices and on the ways in which they are implemented. In this way these subjective reactions end up constituting a risk both for the user and for the psychic health of the operator, who removes them instead of managing and transforming them.

All this is complicated in the transcultural relationship. In this case, not only the individual counter-transference comes into play, but also a wider defensive reaction, activated by cultural differences, which acts both in the individual operator and in the organisation of the services, almost always in an unconscious way. In fact, when a phenomenon - sensation, emotion, perception, explanation - that comes from a specific cultural world cannot be assigned to a category that is familiar to us, it is easy to defend oneself by misinterpreting it or at least disqualifying it as irrelevant or even primitive.

Supervision is, since the beginning of psychoanalysis, the most important tool through which the analyst controls and compares his own doing and the pursuit of an ethic of encounter. This tool should also be used by practitioners and anyone who deals with human behaviour.

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Email: diversamente.bologna@gmail.com