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Analytic writers have studied existential anxiety or annihilation anxiety, emanating from traumatic disruptions to people’s sense of going-on-being, reminders of their finitude, and facing a chaotic reality, and suggested that they can endure this anxiety by being with and living through it together with another person. The literature suggests that to be with patients who experience such anxiety, therapists need to indulge >narcissistically< in their own memories and fantasies of similar experiences, and, in parallel to the patients, enter transient regressive states. Sometimes, however, therapists are faced with a chaotic analytic reality that arouses existential anxiety in themselves, and seek to share it with their supervisors who, by experiencing parallel regressive states, can identify with their supervisees and grasp their experiences. Supervisors who consistently fail to be with their supervisees at such moments and persist in offering them new constructions of therapeutic materials might strengthen the supervisees’ defensive operations and disrupt their development as therapists.
Children construct their inner worlds by internalizing real and imagined aspects of their parental figures and their families as whole objects with their relational configurations. These familial configurations are often evoked in the context of communities that, similarly to families, struggle to preserve and advance their unity and collective values, interests, and symbols. Supervisees acknowledge their internalized familial relational configurations when they explore their countertransferences and their transferential responses to the analytic community. Understanding these transferences in supervision may facilitate the process of assimilating the analytic community into supervisees’ professional selves. Moreover, the supervisors represent and mediate both the community’s balanced and flexible relational therapeutic positions and its complexities. These positions might provide the supervisees with new group-object experiences and change their defensively organized rigid familial relational configurations, thereby further integrating the supervisees’ professional selves as well as strengthening the analytic community.