SUPERVISION

 

Professional practice always involves working with and through relationships. Whether in clinical settings, healthcare, leadership roles or teams – wherever people work with people, conscious and unconscious dynamics are at play

Supervision offers a protected space to recognise these dynamics, understand them, and develop new possibilities for action. The focus is not on quick solutions, but on a deeper understanding of the processes that shape professional practice – often beneath the surface of what is immediately visible.

 

Psychodynamic supervision – more than case discussion

 

Supervision, as I practice it, is more than reviewing cases. It is a dialogic space in which not only specific situations are examined, but also one's own patterns, transferences, role conflicts and relational experiences. Precisely where professional neutrality is expected, unconscious identifications and loyalties are at work – with patients, clients, colleagues or the organisation itself.

 

Psychoanalytic thinking provides a robust framework for making these processes legible, without rushing to evaluate or fix them. In the work together, situations that feel stuck can begin to move again.

 

Team supervision and team development

 

In many teams, unconscious conflicts absorb significant energy. Difficulties in collaboration – between professional groups, between individuals, or at the interface with the wider organisation – generate misunderstanding, rivalry and blocked creativity. Teams often lose a coherent sense of their own identity and purpose, particularly after restructuring, mergers, rapid growth or shifting mandates.

 

The result is familiar: routines harden, tensions with the organisation escalate, uncertainty and competition shape everyday working life.

 

Psychodynamic team supervision combines structured phases of team development – attending to task clarity, role understanding, communication culture, team identity and burnout prevention – with more open, associative processes in which conscious and unconscious conflicts become visible and workable.

 

Team supervision can help to:

• bring the team's core task back into focus
• transform unproductive tension into constructive energy
• clarify team identity in relation to the wider organisation

This approach is particularly well suited to international and diverse teams, where differences in professional culture, language and background add layers of complexity to group dynamics – and where psychodynamic thinking offers tools to work across, rather than around, those differences.

 

Peer consultation and leadership coaching

 

Leaders frequently navigate the tension between loyalty to their teams and the demands of organisational goals. Conflicts – with teams, individuals or institutional structures – can escalate overtly or remain latently corrosive. Difficult personnel situations go unspoken; entanglements deepen.

 

Drawing on the Balint group model from medical supervision, I offer peer consultation groups in which leaders can bring live situations, conflicts or challenging working relationships to a small, stable group. One participant presents a current difficulty; the group responds not with advice, but through identificatory processes, hypotheses and reflective feedback. Alternative perspectives emerge – perspectives that make it possible to recognise one's own entanglement and find a more constructive way forward.

 

Individual leadership coaching is also available for those who prefer a one-to-one format.

 

Working with startups, NGOs and purpose-driven organisations

 

Fast-growing organisations and mission-driven teams face distinctive pressures: role boundaries that shift faster than they can be negotiated, founders navigating the transition from visionary to manager, staff carrying high emotional stakes in work that is personally meaningful. These conditions generate particular forms of relational stress – idealisation, burnout, loyalty conflicts, and the collapse of professional distance.

 

Psychodynamic supervision is well placed to address these dynamics, without pathologising them. The aim is not to slow organisations down, but to help the people within them remain thoughtful, resilient and relationally effective under pressure.

 

Individual or team supervision – in person or online

 

Supervision is available in my practice in Berlin-Mitte and online, in English or German.

In individual supervision, the focus is on reflecting your own professional role, relational patterns and working style.

 

In team supervision, we work with group dynamics – within the team and at the boundary with the organisation.

 

Why psychoanalytic supervision – and why it matters for your organisation

 

Most supervision approaches work well with what is already visible: stated conflicts, named difficulties, agreed goals. Psychoanalytic supervision goes further. It is specifically equipped to address what organisations often cannot address by themselves.

 

The elephant in the room. In many teams and organisations, everyone senses what the real problem is – but no one says it. A founding team that has outgrown its original dynamic. A leadership figure whose authority is quietly undermined. A structural conflict that keeps reappearing in different disguises. Psychoanalytic supervision creates the conditions in which these unspoken realities can be named – carefully, and without blame.

 

Hidden conflicts and displaced experience. What surfaces in a team meeting is rarely the whole story. Conflicts that appear to be about process, workload or communication often carry older material: experiences of exclusion, disappointment, loyalty under pressure, or the residue of previous organisations. Psychoanalytic thinking attends to this displacement – not to make work into therapy, but to understand why certain situations keep generating heat out of proportion to their apparent cause.

 

Flat hierarchies and their particular difficulties. Non-hierarchical or lightly structured organisations – common in startups, NGOs and purpose-driven teams – do not eliminate power dynamics. They often intensify them, by making them harder to locate and address. When authority is informal, rivalry and dependency go underground. Psychoanalytic supervision is particularly well suited to working with these conditions, because it does not assume that named structures tell the whole story of how power and influence actually operate.

 

The problem of repetition. Perhaps the most consistent finding in organisational life is that the same conflicts tend to recur – with different people, in different roles, but with a recognisable underlying structure. A team that could not resolve a conflict with one manager reproduces the same dynamic with the next. A leader who left one organisation because of a specific tension finds the same tension waiting in the new one. Psychoanalytic supervision takes repetition seriously as information: it asks what the pattern is carrying, and what would need to shift for something genuinely different to become possible.

 

Leadership development that goes beneath the surface. Effective leadership is not primarily a set of skills to be acquired. It is a relational and psychological position – one that requires self-knowledge, the capacity to tolerate ambiguity, and the ability to remain thoughtful under pressure. With many years of experience working with leaders across sectors – in clinical settings, corporate environments, NGOs and public institutions – I bring both the theoretical grounding and the practical judgment to support this kind of development. Not leadership as performance, but leadership as a sustained practice of reflection and presence.

 

 

Psychoanalytic supervision does not make organisations comfortable. It makes them more honest – and in that honesty, more capable of doing the work they set out to do.

 

Contact me for further information or for an appointment: 030 4209 4207