The Individuating Supervisor

Abstract

Individuation is a process of personal development whereby a person becomes more conscious of who they are. It can be seen as ‘a movement towards wholeness by means of an integration of conscious and unconscious parts of the personality’ (Samuels, 1985, p. 102).The term is normally employed to denote a process that encompasses the whole person and spans the whole course of his or her development. In this chapter, it is used in a limited sense, in relation to one particular aspect of a person’s functioning, that is to say, development in the clinical task of supervision. So, here, the concept of individuation is being used in a way that could be called metaphorical, in order to discover what light the concept can throw on the specialised process of becoming a supervisor. It is, of course, assumed that anyone who gets to the point of supervising others, although he may only be at the beginning of the task of individuating as a supervisor, will already have taken steps along the path of individuation as a whole person.