ABSTRACT
Clinical supervision has been around for over a century. First devised as a support and reflective space for social workers in the late nineteenth century in the United States, it was slowly adopted by other helping professions – probation, advice and welfare programmes, employee assistance programmes and teaching. In the early days of Freud there is some evidence that small groups gathered to discuss and review each others’ client work. Supervision was informal at this stage. Max Eitington is reckoned to be the first to make supervision a formal requirement for those in their psychoanalytic training in the 1920s. The second phase of supervision emerged in the 1950s with the introduction of other counselling or psychotherapy orientations besides the psychodynamic. The type of supervision emanating from these new developments has been called ‘counselling-bound or psychotherapy-bound’ models of supervision in that they allied their theory and interventions in supervision to the counselling or psychotherapy orientation they espoused. Watching Rogers, Perls or Ellis supervising would make an observer wonder what was different from the manner in which they supervised to the way they engaged in counselling. It was in the 1970s that supervision began to move away from counselling and make a bid for being more of an educational process than a counselling one. The focus moved from the person doing the work to the work itself. As a result the social role or developmental frameworks for supervision became more popular. Supervision now became centred on practice, the actual work done with a view to using that work to improve future work. This was quite a major shift in supervision theory and practice and the divide between counselling and supervision was firmly established. Supervision was unapologetically and unashamedly centred on practice and whatever impacted on that practice was the rightful subject of supervision (e.g. the person of the practitioner, the impact of the organisations involved).
