Presenters: Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Rezeda Popova, and Ekkehard Tenschert

Description:

Supervision is one of the main supporting tools for Gestalt therapy practitioners and students. It is intended to be a basic instrument of growth. On account of its crucial nature, it needs to be informed by the history, themes, and values of our approach.

We propose a model of supervision that is faithful to a situational (or field) perspective and includes and supports the excitement (motivation and intentionality) of both supervisee and supervisor.

Gestalt therapy supervision is a complex, contextualized, and situated clinical practice aimed at supporting the intentionality of the therapist and the client in their therapeutic meeting.

Four realms of recognition will be described, as guidelines for Gestalt supervisors.

The proposed main goal of supervision is recognition of the supervisee’s intentionality. This offers a framework for preventing shame, restoring dignity, and rehumanizing the moment of encounter.

This model represents the reflections after 10 years of work for training programs on supervision. Margherita will present it together with two former students who are now trainers, Rezeda and Ekkehard.

Biographies:

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, PsyD, is the director of Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy (Milan, Siracuse, Palermo). She has developed some basic clinical concepts of Gestalt therapy, integrating what she has learned from Isadore From with her experiences with Daniel Stern and other exponents of intersubjectivity and primary relationships, and with neuroscientists like Vittorio Gallese. She has approached the description of the ground experience of the self (the “polyphonic development of domains”), of the intuition of the therapist as a function of the field condition (the “aesthetic relational knowledge”), until her recent studies on “the dance of reciprocity” between therapist and client, as a switch of paradigm needed in our pandemic times. As the director of training programs for Gestalt therapy supervisors for 10 years, she has studied an aesthetic, phenomenological, and field-oriented model of supervision. She is the main editor of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series (Routledge).

More about her work: https://www.gestaltitaly.com/margherita-spagnuolo-lobb/

Rezeda Ravilevna Popova, a Gestalt therapist, supervisor, and researcher, has expertise in clinical and developmental psychology, holds a PhD in developmental psychology, and is a member of EAGT. She is the founder and the director of the Volga Region Institute for Gestalt Therapy (Russia). She is the editor of a Russian-language publication of a number of books on Gestalt therapy and the author of articles. She cooperates with the editorial board of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series (Routledge).

Ekkehard Tenschert is a Gestalt therapist, trainer, and supervisor in Vienna, Austria, and currently the head of the FSIG/ÖAGG. His most recent publication deals with ethical problems with expelling a trainee from psychotherapy training (British Gestalt Journal 33.2, 2024). He cooperates with the editorial board of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series (Routledge).