Matter arising from the responses of Claire Bacha and Farhad Dalal to each other over the latter’s paper entitled ‘The ethics of supervision’

The very first statement used by Foulkes in all of his books is,

I do not expound my teaching to any who are not eager to learn; I do not help out anyone who is not anxious to explain himself; if, after being shown the first corner of a subject, a man cannot go on and discover the other three, I do not repeat the lesson. Confucius. (epigraph from Foulkes, 1948)

‘Deskilling’ is the term that (Dalal, 2021) declared he had heard reported to him as spoken by a group-analytic supervisor to a group-analyst-in-training, and over which he felt shocked. Bacha (2021) then declares that she had used this expression herself and believes she had invented it: I first heard it in 1979 in workplace group supervision while teaching in an adolescent unit. Reading Dalal’s paper and the subsequent correspondence led me to consider it an unusual expression for group-analysis. Foulkes himself devised a more apt expression, that of ‘unlearning’ i.e. unlearning old (neurotic?) approaches to living (and training, and supervising, and therapy?) that opened up psychic space and energy for other approaches to living (Foulkes, 1948). Some analytic maxims are useful, like ‘unlearning’ repetitious behaviour and emotional responses that otherwise lead to the same mental cul-de-sac, whereas members are led by the group process to remove their psychological blinkers. For example, those suffering from socio-phobia report back to groups that this has slipped away without them barely noticing, certainly without any conscious effort.

Much of the dispute between Dalal and Bacha centres around the position of authority, which is the territory of superego or the Over-I. One of the outcomes of analysis of either kind will most likely be a reduction of superego influence over the client, or trainee. In this odd profession, what fundamentally troubles the individual is rarely what s/he believes is the cause but instead something that is far off and long ago. The analyst’s stance, from either discipline, represents a paradoxical injunction of saying sotto voce or else implying, ‘Don’t try and change’. Likewise in training supervision, the implicit message is ‘don’t try and learn “how to be a psychotherapist”; instead turn up here and tell us what happened last meeting, and how you experienced it’. Thinking about questioning the supervisor’s apparent view and later actually doing so, perhaps heatedly, is all part of donning the ‘multiform’ of the training, as opposed to the ‘uniform’. Lines of authority are rightly expected in the military, whereas psychotherapy acts paradoxically in this regard, setting up structures, or else uncovering them in the individual or group, that need to be pulled down again and again. I suggest reading what Foulkes had to say about resistance in training,

Pat de Maré, the largely ignored genius of group analysis, used the term ‘inter-vision’ as an alternative to supervision, especially for after qualifying. He never explained it but repeated it every so often as its own explanation, that is, a vision or insight among people as an alternative to any that encouraged dependency upon a supervisor. In a training supervision, the supervisor maintains the same stance as Foulkes suggested for the group analyst, a decrescendo of her/his influence over time as the group itself becomes the instrument of supervision. This attitude always makes life much more interesting for the supervisor and ensures that the group members learn by ‘doing so’ rather than by being told ‘how to’.

Finally, would Alexander Pope have made a group-analyst? Perhaps he already had been?

Tis not enough your counsel still be true;

Blunt truths more mischief than fine falsehoods do;

Men must be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown proposed as things forgot. (Pope, 1969)