The Quiet Profession: Supervisors of Psychotherapy

The philosophy of teaching and supervising represented in Anne Alonso's book "The Quiet Profession" focuses on the potential of relationships to heal, and on the ways that feeling creates profound and transformational personal growth. Psychodynamic psychotherapy is learned through a kind of apprenticeship, one in which the supervisor functions as a mentor and model for the supervisee. It is not the acquisition of a specific technique or interventional skill that makes the difference, Anne argues; but rather, it is the development of internal capacities within the psychotherapist, to tolerate painful affect in ourselves and our patients, to be empathically attuned to our patients' dilemmas, and to hold our patients ambivalence about it all with a steady and reliable presence, that allows people to change. Central to this enterprise is the psychotherapist's ability to listen to what is being said underneath the words being uttered, and to begin to hear the faint but powerful voice of the ancient ghosts unconsciously coming alive in the patient's life in the present. It is Anne's belief, and a tenet of psychodynamic theory that, through this often silent but steady way of listening, the psychotherapist helps patients to begin to tell the only story of their life that really matters.