Three Associating: Adventures in Relational Psychoanalytic Supervision

Gill Straker, Rachael Burton, Andrew Geeves

Three Associating is a podcast that offers the listener a peek behind the closed doors of therapists working within a relational psychoanalytic model. Join Rachael and Andrew as they explore with their supervisor Gill how their own hidden feelings and motivations influence the therapeutic process and affect their patients. In each episode, a relational dilemma arising in the context of work with a fictitious patient is explored. While reasons of confidentiality and privacy mean that none of the patients we discuss are real, the relational dynamics are.

www.threeassociating.com

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23 episodes
monthly
Avg 25 min
English

Episodes 23

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S6 · E10
Sunday · 24 min
Episode 10: I'm Glad My Mum Died (The Encore)
In this episode, Rachael asks 'what is the value of the therapist’s hostility?' While the answer is always contextual, Rachael and Gill explore how hostility can serve as a defence against vulnerability and a longing for closeness. They also explore together the importance of affect and the ability to tolerate a range of emotions without shame including the negative affects. The session also highlights how being in emotion whether positive or negative may obscure other levels of analysis which are attached to meaning and words. Rachael ponders why there had been a certain rigidity in her feelings towards the patient and what eventually may have allowed her to move beyond the rigidity. The supervision session concludes with an acknowledgment that countertransference feelings are mercurial when the work is going well and when it isn’t attending to the rigidity is a push in the right direction .
S6 · E9
October 4 · 23 min
Episode 9: Feudal Lord Forever? Maturing Through Play
In this episode, Andrew gives new meaning to Winnicott's idea of “playing with reality” as he tries to help his patient into a more social reality through the medium of play. In the session, Andrew⁠ and Gill reflect together on the fact that in a long-term therapy both the patient and the therapist develop beyond where they started and that the match between them needs to be re-thought in the light of this. In the beginning of the supervision, Andrew⁠ finds himself making a division in his head between work and play but then comes to realise that while the play is the work, there nevertheless is still room to transform the mode of play. In this way, the possibility of thinking about elided topics such as sexuality opens up. In addition, there is an opening up to a more enlivened way of working in the transference.
S6 · E8
September 6 · 26 min
Episode 8: When A Patient Dies - Funerals And Feelings
In this episode, Andrew deals with the poignancy of the premature death of his patient. His presenting problem in the supervision is whether or not he should go to the funeral. While this is indeed a dilemma to be reckoned with, as the session unfolds it becomes clear that there are many other issues and feelings that are masked by Andrew’s focus on the issue of the funeral. One of the issues Andrew is struggling with underneath the tangible funeral issue is allowing himself to feel both his sadness at the death of the patient as well as his own significance to her. In the course of supervision, Andrew⁠ finds that he is caught in a dynamic that is familiar to him where it is easier for him to go to conflict than to go to more tender feelings. Andrew⁠ explores some of the unconscious ploys that he uses to avoid certain feelings and comes to acknowledge the Lacanian claim that feelings can lie. Thus one feeling for example guilt can be used to cover over another for example mourning. This frees ⁠Andrew⁠⁠ to more thoughtfully approach the issue of whether or not to go to the funeral and to understand the deeper meaning of his dilemma.
S6 · E7
August 2 · 24 min
Episode 7: "I Feel Unsafe" - Victimisation and Fragilisation
In this episode, Rachael takes on a number of important questions including when is it appropriate to bypass defences by uniting with the patient’s perspective and when to try to get under the defences and how to do this . Similarly, Rachael explores the question of when to push against resistance and when to work around resistance or go to a third option of analysing the resistance. Rachael also comes up against the fact that her memory of the patient in a previous phase of therapy is affecting her ability to simply be present with the patient in the current moment. Following Bion's dictum to try to be without memory or desire, Rachael is able to reappropriate the value of working in the transference-countertransference matrix as it is unfolding in the room. She is also able to share with the patient the load of reflection and thought by asking questions and directing the treatment rather than doing all the work herself.
S6 · E6
July 5 · 27 min
Episode 6: Frustration and Envy - The Apparent Luxury of Collapse
In this episode, Andrew encounters a patient whose stated objective is to own her own competence and self assuredness and to be more like him. Andrew anticipates encountering a people pleaser and is surprised when he encounters a lack of it. The patient stonewalls him in particular moments She resists his attempts to move closer by masking her anger and collapsing into tears and shutting him down. In response, Andrew⁠ consciously carries her denied anger but denies his own unconscious envy of her freedom to collapse. This leads him to subtly undercut her anger while consciously intending to invite it. In this interplay of the patient’s and therapist’s joint unconscious denials, affect heightens and thought decreases. Through supervision, a better balance between feeling and thought is achieved and Andrew⁠⁠ moves forward taking ownership of his own envy in the gender wars.
S6 · E5
May 31 · 26 min
Episode 5: I'm Glad My Mum Died, But It's A Shame I Didn't Get To Kill Her
In this episode, Rachael gets tangled up in her own anger and hostility towards her patient on behalf of the patient’s daughter. While trying to distance herself from the patient's enmeshment with the daughter she inadvertently gets enmeshed herself in the patient’s dynamic. By more fully accessing her anger with the patient and realising that in her mind she has been treating the daughter rather than the patient, she is able to recenter herself more clearly with the patient in the room. The importance of feeling into the therapy and not only thinking into the therapy is emphasised, with the end point of integrating both. Rachael⁠ must own her murderous rage towards the mother/patient and to reflect on its meaning and beyond that have the capacity to articulate it in a form which can be heard by the patient. By the end of the session, Rachael⁠ is able to achieve this.
S6 · E4
May 3 · 25 min
Episode 4: Therapy Terminable And Interminable
In this episode, Andrew struggles with the question of therapy terminable and interminable. He faces an ethical dilemma as to whether continuing therapy with a particular patient who has made considerable gains would be in some way unethical. Andrew⁠ is thoughtful about the issue of fostering dependence which is an important issue to consider. However, he finds through supervision that he has unconsciously stepped into enacting the role of the patient's authoritarian father who imposed separations on the patient as a child. Andrew⁠ comes to see he has engaged in a subtle power struggle and has unconsciously used psychoanalytic premises as an anti analytical third that blocks thought rather than facilitates it. Interestingly, Andrew⁠’s awareness of the enactments in therapy are discovered through a parallel process that emerges in the supervisory relational field.
S6 · E3
April 5 · 26 min
Episode 3: Fostering Dependence And Nurturing Independence
In this episode, Rachael struggles with her own feelings about her therapy being cut across by a psychiatrist who seems to be opposed to long term therapy. She feels activated especially as the patient has asked her to intervene and contact the psychiatrist. In supervision, she engages with her frustration at the interference in her treatment and her therapeutic relationship and also her anger in relation to the zeitgeist that opposes in-depth therapy. Rachael⁠ recognises that in her activation she gets pulled into focusing more on the zeitgeist and less on the patient and is hooked by the emergence of her own sibling rivalry . These are not enacted with the patient but they interfere with Rachael⁠’s ability to think about the analytic meaning of the patient’s request. Through supervision, she is able to see that she is inadvertently being invited into a split and while activated is loosing the opportunity to explore the psychodynamic meaning of the patient’s request. Through this understanding she returns to her analytic position.
S6 · E2
March 1 · 21 min
Episode 2: The Impenetrable Couple - Therapist As Third Wheel
In this episode, Andrew presents an unusual situation where a patient requires his partner to be present in his therapy not to work on couple dynamics, but as a benign observer. Andrew finds himself unable to resist this demand both because Andrew is ideologically opposed to imposing his will on the patient and because he can’t in the moment think why the patient’s preference should be resisted. Andrew consciously accepts the patient’s narrative that therapy should take place in the threesome but unconsciously resists it. This resistance manifests in an insistent thought that the therapy will be short term. In supervision, he realises that the thought is a wish covering over his frustration at being manoeuvred into working in a way that is restrictive and recognises that he is in the presence of a merger. Andrew comes to see this merger as less sweet and more problematic than he had thought and he determines to use his frustration to challenge the merger and negotiate a different therapeutic frame.
S6 · E1
February 1 · 25 min
Episode 1: I Used ChatGPT And I Still Got Castrated
In this episode, Rachael struggles with her impulse to be castrating when she encounters what she experiences as an impenetrable patient, a Citadel. She is irked by the patient constantly batting away her interventions and seemingly needing to know better than her. In this episode, she and Gill discuss a stinging intervention that Rachael made. The problem was less the intervention itself than Rachael’s desire to cut the patient down, a desire she recognised and asked for help to resist. Through supervision Rachael was able to be more in touch with the patient’s vulnerability and developmental age and to move past the power struggle the patient evoked and to think about how to engage his vulnerability.
S5 · E8
Sep 7, 2025 · 24 min
Episode 8: Hot Shrink For A Hot Minute: Erotic Transference Part II
In this episode, Rachael plumbs the mysteries of the erotic, both in the transference and the countertransference; mysterious because it occurs in liminal or transitional space as Winnicott would say. It is a space of illusion and disillusion where it is not clear what belongs to who. Both Rachael and her patient playfully enjoy the experience, while both in their own way bring in a third to dilute the experience. Rachael becomes aware of her own loss in this and is able both to observe and experience it while also observing and experiencing her patient's change. Together with Gill, the associators conclude that sometimes it is better to settle the waters by not stirring them. The erotic is often beyond words, and thus leaving the erotic known but unarticulated is, in this instance, a good option.
S5 · E7
Aug 17, 2025 · 23 min
Episode 7: Jetlagging: The Unconscious Hiding In Plane Sight
In his therapy with Noor, Andrew comes to realise that he is inadvertently co-constructing an avoidance of grieving and mourning. Through a careful unpacking of enactments in the room, Andrew comes to see how mini separations and losses within the therapy caused by sessions ending and holidays taken influence both the content and process of therapy. Through modifications in the pace and rhythms of therapy, Noor unconsciously communicates her grief. Andrew initially struggles to recognise this as to do so involves him in accepting loss himself. Andrew is helped by his unconscious, which reveals itself in the session both through an enactment of a jet lagged state, and an understanding of what the words jet lag signify. Thus, an understanding of both the music and the the words of the session, as it developed in supervision, allowed a paradigm shift from intellectual defence to emotional engagement.
S5 · E6
Jul 13, 2025 · 23 min
Episode 6: Not Messing Around: The Pleasures Of Being A Mean Girl
In this episode, Rachael encounters the uncanny intelligence of the patient's unconscious. The patient, having criticised Rachael for her “messy” management of her clinical practice then adopts the same management style and surreptitiously benefits from it. Feeling guilty, the patient has a dream revealing these dynamics but withholds her insights from Rachael. This produces a desire in Rachael to be mean and partake of the jouissance of revenge. By unpacking her own unconscious with Gill, it becomes clear to Rach that her countertransference wish is a clue to the patient's fear, which is preventing her from surrendering into the patient position.
S5 · E5
Jun 15, 2025 · 29 min
Episode 5: Up Against The Limit: Staring Into The Void
In this episode, Andrew finds himself embodying traumas the patient has experienced but has placed an explicit prohibition on articulating. During his therapy sessions with Rob, Andrew respects this prohibition. There is much else to speak about and the session feels lively. However, after every session Andrew feels strangely dead, reflecting a limit on his capacity to comfortably process powerful affects when words are off limit and the patient wishes to screen off pain and to avoid facing into the void. Questions are raised about the perils of going along with the patient's wish not to speak the unspeakable as well the dangers of not doing so. All the while, the affective registration of Rob's screened off trauma persists at somatic and affective levels in Andew as an embodiment of Rob's traumatic memories. The power of this is barely tolerable and Andrew feels doomed if he does speak and doomed if he doesn’t, but in the supervision he explores the possibility of a third way and finds a way out of the binary.
S5 · E4
May 11, 2025 · 25 min
Episode 4: I'm Not OK That You're OK
In this episode, Andrew presents us with an insoluble ethical dilemma. Is it desirable or even possible for therapists to remain neutral when the patient lives by a value system very discrepant from their own and seems to do so comfortably and credits the therapy for this outcome? Andrew and Gill agree that therapists are not neutral as they have their own moral compasses, even if they believe it is incumbent on them to bracket them. They also agree it is fair to question the patient about the consequences of their new found comfort with problematic actions and to explore if the comfort is authentic or defensive. However, Andrew and Gill also accept that they may be defending themselves against accepting the patient's comfort with a lack of empathy for those in his ambit. They are left with the question 'Whose defensiveness is it anyway?'.
S5 · E3
Apr 16, 2025 · 28 min
Episode 3: Unexpected Twists and Turns: Prayer Cards Part 2
In this rich episode, Rachael grapples with a variety of complex nuanced issues such as an unexpected ending and the feat of balancing the therapist's self interest with the patient’s interest in a number of domains, including payment. Also on the table were inner conflicts around masochism and self care and the potential risks and rewards of playfulness and creativity and the inherent pleasures and perils that they engender. At the end of the session, Rachael and Gill concluded that whatever side we finally land on in the resolution of inner conflict, it is essential to own the outcome and to stay authentic and transparent.
S5 · E2
Mar 2, 2025 · 24 min
Episode 2: Us Vs Them Thinking - A Silent Threat To Your Mental Health
In this episode, Andrew struggles with the power of splitting and projection as they close down thought, generate anger, and diminish compassion. He gets caught in these dynamics and struggles with his own reactivity as anger and defensive intellectualisation masquerading as thinking emerge in the therapy space. Through supervision, Andrew realises the fear and existential threat that underpins these dynamics. He moves from a wish to confront binaries and from an appeal to both/and thinking to understanding the feelings underpinning either/or thinking, projection, and othering. Andrew comes to see how his own responses have been subverted by this extremely pressuring dynamic and returns to the capacity to go meta to himself and to the transference/counter-transference matrix
S5 · E1
Feb 2, 2025 · 25 min
Episode 1: How To Spot Narcissism - Red Flags and Dating Hacks
In this episode, Rachael works with a young woman who is desperate to find the right man and equally desperate to find a failsafe way to make a good choice. A prolific consumer of social media, she scours all the information about red flags that are meant to help someone spot a narcissist (e.g. lovebombing, gaslighting, self-centredness). She appeals to Rachael to assist in this endeavour of constructing and applying lists of red flags. Rachael tries to shift the agenda to fostering agency, but to no avail. In supervision, Gill asks a series of questions which leads Rachael to her own conclusion that her own narcissism constellated around the “need to know”. A common dynamic in therapists is implicated in this therapeutic impasse.
S4 · E8
Dec 22, 2024 · 25 min
Episode 8: Hooked On A Feeling: Traumatophilia and Traumatophobia
In this episode, Rachael is conflicted about performance artist Petra's wish for Rachael to watch a video of Petra engaging in human suspension. Rachael has an immediate countertransference feeling that she doesn’t want to be “implicated". Rachael does not understand this feeling as she is aware of the mastery involved in this activity and also Petra's pride in her ability. However, Petra also speaks of her engagement in this practice as a means of regulating her affect. Rachael comes to understand that her reaction to Petra’s request was connected to wanting not to judge Petra’s engagement in human suspension and also wanting not to turn a blind eye to the trauma that could be "implicated” in Petra’s activity. Thus, Rachael comes to understand her own reaction as pointing to the need to integrate both the positives and the problems involved in Petra’s chosen mode of mastery and self soothing and to engage with both traumatophilia and traumatophobia (Saketopoulou, 2023).
S4 · E7
Dec 7, 2024 · 22 min
Episode 7: The Sound of Silence
In this session, Andrew is confused by why Amber, an anorexic adolescent woman, is so silent in session when she chats easily with other team members. Andrew is sidetracked both by his anxiety about his position in the team and his anxiety that he is getting it wrong. In supervision, Andrew comes to understand that his different treatment by Amber may signal something positive including Amber's emerging desires for male attention. He explores how safety for both him and Amber may lie in introducing material that can cut across the intensity of the therapeutic couple while, paradoxically and at the same time, detaching himself from his persecutory anxieties about the team which interfere with his focus on Amber.

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