Expanding the role of supervision in child psychiatric education

Abstract

Despite the burgeoning of available therapeutic interventions, the sparse literature devoted to child psychiatric supervision concentrates on individual psychotherapy. The non-cognitive aspects of the expanding supervisory challenge continues to converge on the clinician's personality, which is a focus of educational attention only in sequestered or haphazard parts of programs. The unidimensional supervisory literature addresses this issue by questioning the extent to which supervision should resemble traditional pedagogy or personal psychotherapy. In contrast to this emphasis on elusive unconscious influences on clinical work, scant attention has been devoted to other influences stemming from the clinician's current experiences, affiliations, identifications, aspirations and similar more easily modifiable factors that exert considerable leverage and tend to be more accessible to rational scrutiny in supervision. The latter half of this paper discusses these factors.