Pasqua Teora, Maria E.Castiglioni, Donatella Carnaccini, Pamela Meda
The article describes and conceptualizes an experience of peer supervision that has been carried out since 2002 by four senior colleagues specializing in systemic-relational therapy, all of whom come from a supervision group which was directed until his death in 2002 by Gianfranco Cecchin, co-founder of the Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia.
The methodology used reflects the teaching of Cecchin: irreverence, freedom of thought, absence of judgment, devotion to duty.
Compared to the intervision groups among professional counterparts, this kind of group work stands out in terms of 'lack' (of competence, of experience) and therefore does not consider the group, made up of peers, sufficient in itself.
The term 'peer supervision', is in fact an oxymoron that expresses a situation of experiences where the skills and relationships maintain a vertical dimension, both through the use of events and contributions from outside the group, and through the recognition of authority in the words of the others, freely expressed and exchanged.
In the internal dynamic of the group, the 'verticality', meaning the super/vision, is not condensed into a specific person, nor taken on in rotation, but it is a circulating 'figure', whose absence can be perceived, and whose presence is cultivated through care in listening, in taking turns to speak, in focusing on the subject, in commitment to critical analysis and in the restitution of meaning on everyone’s part of each one’s experience.
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