Through a glass darkly: Using a reflecting team approach in the development of supervisory practice

Foulkes placed working with countertransference and parallel process as central to group supervision. This article offers a model for developing supervisory skills in recognizing and making use of countertransference and parallel process in group supervision. It adds two perspectives: firstly it draws on Alfred Lorenzer’s concept of ‘scenic understanding’, a method of identifying social and cultural triggers from the past that cause patients’ problems in the present but which are outside of conscious awareness. Secondly, it adapts a reflecting team approach developed by Anderson and Prest for use in training supervisors of groups. In the following model of reflecting team supervision it is the therapist’s ‘scenes’, triggered and evoked by a patient or therapy group that are presented. The supervision group responds by offering their associations and emotional responses, and this is observed by a reflecting team. They then change places and the supervision group watches the reflecting team offer their observations and hypotheses. In the final stage of the process, the two groups meet together to share their learning and reflect on the experience. This approach is illustrated with vignettes, and highlights some of the benefits.

Alienation and Digital Labour—A Depth-Hermeneutic Inquiry into Online Commodification and the Unconscious

At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analyses of Facebook posts that exemplify how alienation is experienced, articulated, and expressed online. For this perspective, the article draws on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2005) reassessment of alienation, as well as the depth-hermeneutic method of “scenic understanding” developed by Alfred Lorenzer (e.g. 1970; 1986).

The Question of the Scene: On the Philosophical Foundations of Theatrical Anthropocentrism

The article consists of two interrelated arguments: First, all theoretical or everyday talk on theatre implies a certain scenic understanding, related to the phenomenon of human action and speech. Second, this understanding has been concealed by an anthropomorphic conception of the human phenomenon, based on the givenness of the human figure. The article tries to deconstruct this figure by analysing classical philosophical texts where the link between the human appearance and the theatrical mode of representation is theoretically established. By questioning this link, new ways to exercise the critique of theatrical anthropocentricism, both in theory and in practice, are established.