Dreaming up the patient in supervision: from the concrete to the symbolic*

This paper discusses the importance of parallel processes within the therapeutic and the supervisory context of therapy with an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. During the first months of the therapy, through powerful projective identification, the therapist found herself in the ‘clothes’ of the ‘dead mother’. She was unable to think and feel in the sessions. Deadness could not be symbolised – it was enacted in the sessions. The therapeutic encounter had to start elsewhere: the supervisor’s reverie brought to life the patient’s material in the context of the supervision, allowing thinking to occur, first within the supervisory relationship and only then in the therapeutic relationship. In the context of supervision, the encounter of two mentally alive people could contain anxieties, metabolise them and open the way to mental connections. This encounter facilitated the development of creative thinking of both the therapist and the young patient in the consulting room, which allowed the child to become the subject of his existence and to evolve.