For Supervisees and Supervisors: When Supervision Stays on the Surface

Whether you’re a therapist bringing cases to supervision or a supervisor trying to facilitate deeper reflection, you know the frustration: supervision that goes through the motions without touching what really matters.

If you’re a supervisee, you’ve experienced this: describing a case in meticulous detail, leaving with notes and suggestions, yet still unable to shift what’s happening with your client. The supervision was professional, thoughtful—but somehow nothing changed.

If you’re a supervisor, you’ve felt this too: listening to a supervisee present a case with growing awareness that something crucial is being avoided. They’re reporting facts but staying outside the emotional reality of the therapeutic relationship. You ask questions, offer observations, but can’t quite help them access what they can’t yet see.

This masterclass addresses both experiences—not with another model of supervision, but by illuminating what makes supervision transformative rather than merely informative.

The Supervision Dilemma Therapists Rarely Name

Consider Elena, an experienced therapist bringing her work with a young man to supervision. She presents a meticulous account: his childhood trauma, his defensive structures, his pattern of idealization followed by rage. She describes her interventions, her theoretical rationale, her concern about the impasse.

Her supervisor listens carefully, offers thoughtful observations about attachment patterns and transference dynamics. Elena writes notes. The supervision ends.

But here’s what didn’t happen: Elena never mentioned the knot in her stomach when this client walks into the room. She didn’t describe how her mind goes blank when he starts shouting, or how she finds herself offering reassurance she doesn’t quite mean. She couldn’t articulate the pull to rescue him or the flash of irritation when he dismisses her interpretations. She reported the case, but she stayed outside it.

Without access to her own countertransference—the visceral, often uncomfortable reactions she’s having in the room—the supervision can only work with half the clinical material. The dyad between Elena and her client remains invisible, unexamined, and therefore unchanged.

Why Dyadic Relationships Need Triangulation

Psychoanalytic theory has long understood what neuroscience now confirms: we cannot fully think about something we are inside of. The therapeutic dyad—therapist and client locked in their unconscious dance—requires a third perspective to make the invisible visible.

This is what Britton called “triangular space”: the capacity to observe the relationship from a position outside it. As infants, we develop this capacity through the parental couple—learning that there is a relationship we are not part of, a perspective that exists beyond the dyad. In adulthood, supervision provides this triangulated position: the supervisor holds the therapeutic couple in mind, seeing dynamics neither participant can access from within.

But triangulation isn’t automatic. It requires the supervisee to bring not just the case narrative, but the lived experience of being in the room. It requires the supervisor to attend not just to the client’s material, but to the supervisee’s blind spots, their defences, their countertransference. And it requires both to think together about what neither can think alone.

When supervision works, it creates what Bion called “a space to think”—a containing environment where previously unthinkable thoughts can be held, examined, and integrated. When it fails, it becomes mere case reporting: informative perhaps, but ultimately sterile.

What Makes Supervision Effective—Or Ineffective

Ineffective supervision stays in the content: What did the client say? What does the research suggest? What technique might work here? These questions have their place, but they miss the process—the unconscious communication happening between therapist and client that often holds the key to the impasse.

Effective supervision enters the intersubjective field: What are you feeling when this client speaks? Where in your body do you notice the therapeutic relationship? When do you find yourself working harder than the client? What can’t you bear to think about this case?

These questions are harder. They require the supervisee to tolerate not-knowing, to acknowledge countertransference without shame, to risk being seen in their uncertainty. They require the supervisor to track not just the reported material but the gaps, the evasions, the moments when the supervisee’s language becomes abstract or their affect flattens.

But this is where transformation happens—not in the advice given, but in the thinking that becomes possible when two minds attend to what one mind cannot hold alone.

The Live Masterclass: Supervision Illuminated

In the second half of this evening, three experienced supervisors will work together with cases brought by participants. This isn’t a demonstration of “correct” supervision—it’s an opportunity to witness how different supervisory minds think about the same material, how they track process alongside content, how they attend to what’s said and what’s avoided.

Participants are invited to submit anonymised cases in advance or bring them on the evening. Watching three supervisors in dialogue—noticing what each attends to, what questions they ask, where they see patterns or gaps—offers a rare glimpse into the supervisory process from multiple vantage points simultaneously.

You’ll see how experienced supervisors:

• Track the supervisee’s presentation for signs of countertransference or defensive reporting
• Notice what’s not being said—the material that remains unconscious or unspeakable
• Use their own responses to the case as clinical data rather than personal reaction
• Create space for thinking rather than rushing to intervention or reassurance
• Hold the complexity of the clinical couple without collapsing into advice-giving

This is supervision as it should be: a live, collaborative exploration of what happens between therapist and client—and between supervisee and supervisor.

What You’ll Gain

For supervisees:

• How to bring cases in a way that opens up reflection rather than closing it down
• How to access and articulate your countertransference without shame
• How to use supervision to protect yourself in difficult work—not through distance, but through understanding
• How to move from “telling the case” to “being in the case” within the safety of the supervisory relationship

For supervisors:

• How to track process alongside content—noticing what the supervisee is avoiding or can’t yet think
• How to intervene in ways that deepen thinking rather than foreclose it
• How to manage the tension between supporting the supervisee and safeguarding the client
• How to create triangulated space where previously unconscious dynamics can be examined

For both:

• A richer understanding of the theoretical foundations of supervision: why it works when it works, and why it fails when it fails
• Practical strategies for making supervision a genuinely reflective space rather than a regulatory requirement
• First-hand experience of how multiple supervisory perspectives illuminate a single case
• Tools for understanding and working with the dynamics of the clinical couple

Why These Three Supervisors

This masterclass brings together supervisors whose combined experience spans psychoanalytic depth, NHS complexity, forensic work, student counselling, and severe personality disorder—offering multiple perspectives on how thoughtful supervisors think together about difficult clinical material. Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn brings four decades of training supervisors and understanding supervision as ethical necessity. Lindsay Shrubsole offers the perspective of 40 years working with clients other services couldn’t hold, developing reflective practice because she understood what happens when thinking stops. Dr Galit Ferguson brings a psychosocial lens, attending to how cultural context and systemic dynamics intersect in therapeutic work.

Limited spaces available. Super early bird pricing ends soon.

Because the cases that keep us awake at night deserve more than reporting—they need a space where thinking becomes possible again.

© nscience 2025 / 26