Abstract

This dissertation phenomenologically examines the experience of supervisees who are involved in Body/Speech/Mind Contemplative Supervision as they open to understanding what has been preventing them from opening to empathy with a client. The study has a four-fold purpose: to elucidate the experience of opening to empathy; to broaden the literature on empathy and its importance in the supervision of psychotherapists; to point the way towards alternative methods of supervision; and to provide a model for other students to follow in preparing phenomenological-hermeneutical dissertations. A review of the literature investigates the nature of empathy and countertransference; reviews the history of contemplative approaches to supervision; and explores the historical Buddhist premises underlying Body/Speech/Mind Supervision. ;During two in-depth, one-to-one interviews, four supervisees, who have been participating in Body/Mind/Speech Supervision, are asked to describe a time they come to understand what has been preventing them from opening to empathy with a client. Transcripts of the interviews are analyzed in a phenomenological style. A self-hermeneutic analysis of the researcher's own experience with the phenomenon is included. ;The findings reveal nineteen essential constituents. At first the therapists are at an impasse--out of relationship with themselves and their clients, externally oriented, and judging themselves for not knowing what to do. As they become internally focused they open to their feelings, sensations, and thoughts, experience figure-ground shifts, and feel taken in unanticipated directions. They realize they are mirroring their clients and are taking on inappropriate expectations. These realizations open them into relationship with themselves and to their clients. This study suggests that while countertransference is a process of fragmentation whereby the therapist is showing himself that he does not know the whole of himself, opening to understanding and empathy is an opening to wholeness which is facilitated by seeing what is and a willingness to be with what is seen