Supervision for therapists and counsellors
Clinical supervision with Dr Philippe Jacquet is available to psychotherapists, counsellors and other mental health practitioners, individually and in small groups, at Harley Street and online. Supervisees range from the newly qualified to clinicians of thirty years who want a different quality of reflective space than the one they have.
The background brought to it is the same one that informs the clinical work: Jungian analyst training, doctoral research, twenty-five years of practice, and specialisms in addiction, eating disorders and trauma. Dr Jacquet also supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital, which means the supervision is informed by what happens when cases go wrong at scale, not only by what happens in a consulting room.
What supervision is for, beyond case management
A good deal of what is called supervision is really oversight: a review of risk, a check on notes, a defensible record that the work was discussed. That has its place and it is not what most therapists are short of.
What is harder to find is a space where your own responses to a client can be looked at rather than tidied away. Where the boredom, the irritation, the dread before a particular Thursday appointment, or the wish to rescue somebody, is treated as clinical information rather than as a lapse. Where parallel process can be noticed as it happens, because it is happening in the supervision too.
That is the tradition this supervision comes from. It attends to the relationship between therapist and client, and to the therapist’s own material as it is stirred by the work, rather than only to technique and compliance.
Group supervision
Small groups of qualified practitioners, meeting regularly, each bringing work in turn.
Group supervision is often presented as the economical option, and it is, but that is the least interesting thing about it. What a group gives you is the other clinicians in it. You hear four other people respond to a case you thought had one obvious reading. You watch someone else struggle with a client who resembles yours more than you would like. And over time you see your own patterns show up in other people’s material, which is a good deal easier to look at than seeing them in your own.
There is also the plain matter of isolation. Private practice is solitary work, and a supervision group is often the only professional room a therapist is in all month. Practitioners who have both usually say the group is what they would keep if they could only keep one.
Groups are kept small so that everyone brings work regularly rather than occasionally.
Specialist supervision
Alongside general caseload supervision, specialist supervision is offered in:
Addiction and substance misuse, including the codependency and family system dimensions that are frequently underaddressed, and the particular difficulties of working with clients who are still using.
Eating disorders, including male presentations, where Dr Jacquet’s doctoral research provides a clinical framework that is, to our knowledge, the only one of its kind in Europe from an analytical psychology perspective.
Trauma and PTSD, informed by more than twenty years of EMDR practice, including supervision of EMDR work itself.
High-functioning professionals and executives, where performance, identity and internal difficulty intersect in ways that are easy to collude with.
Format
Individual and group supervision, in person at Harley Street W1 and Central London, and by secure video. Weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on your caseload, your stage of practice and what your professional body requires.
An initial conversation is the right first step: what you are working with, what you want from supervision, and whether this is the right fit. Nothing is committed beyond it.
See also: clinical supervisor in London, clinical supervision in Colchester, and what good supervision actually does.