Theories of change and the practice of systemic supervision

The general idea of supervision involves the prejudice that the supervisor is the one who can (must) correct the supervisee's mistakes. The field of systemic therapy is by no means free from the exercise of authority, the development of supervisory modalities shows some peculiarities that we would like to deal with in the following pages. The basic purpose of psychotherapy supervision is to help supervisees develop an experiential expertise, useful in treating their clients. The supervisory experience thus cannot be detached from theoretical models. Using the isomorphic perspective, the supervisor can transform this replication into an intervention, redirecting a therapist's behaviour and thereby influencing interactions at various levels of the system. The quality of a specific client's therapy is supposed to improve as a side effect of the supervisee's overall professional growth.