Supervision ON LACAN AND SUPERVISION: A MATTER OF SUPER-AUDITION DRIES DULSSTER and STIJN VANHEULE Supervision is crucial to most forms of talking therapy. This article focuses on psychoanalysis and explores how supervision can be conceptualized from a Lacanian point of view. We discuss two principal ideas about supervision from Lacan’s work: making the analyst sensitive to the sym- bolic component of the unconscious and becoming sensitive to the interre- lation between language and jouissance. These ideas comprise two stages that Lacan discerned in the process of supervision: the ‘stage of the rhino’ and the ‘stage of the pun’. We illustrate Lacan’s distinction between these stages by means of vignettes of analysts who were supervised by Lacan. We argue that an additional third stage should be discerned, concerning the challenge of incarnating the position of the so-called object a. Last, we discuss the pitfalls that an analyst might experience when conducting and directing the analytic work, namely the consistency of the imaginary, the delusion of the symbolic and the real of the body. KEYWORDS: LACAN, SUPERVISION, SUPERAUDITION, PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY, LANGUAGE INTRODUCTION Supervision is crucial to most forms of talking therapy. It is a platform to support the therapist and to critically reflect on his or her practice. For many, it is a central component of clinical training (e.g. Rainbow Report, 1955), a part of good practice and professional development (e.g. Fleming & Steen, 2004a), and a prerequisite for the practice of psychotherapy (e.g. Roth & Fonagy, 1996; Corrie & Lane, 2015; Barnett & Molzon, 2014). Not only is supervision correlated with more effective therapy, it also increases job satisfaction and lowers instances of burnout (Falender, Shafranske & Ofek, 2014). In this paper, we discuss supervision from a Lacanian perspective as research on this topic seems scarce, or isn’t mentioned at all (Ellis et al., 1996; Zaslavsky, Nunes & Eizirik, 2005; Ogden, 2005; Rubinstein, 2007). How supervision is addressed in other psychoanalytic traditions is not the focus of this paper. © 2019 BPF and John Wiley & Sons Ltd British Journal of Psychotherapy 35, 1 (2019) 54–70 doi: 10.1111/bjp.12423 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Ghent University Academic Bibliography