Supervision: Wisdom pot consciousness
Therapy Today, October 2023

Let me begin with a variant of the Ananse folk tale as told by the Akan people of Ghana. In the tale ‘Ananse and the pot of wisdom’, we find Ananse the spider traversing the globe with a pot. He supposedly harvests every bit of wisdom, putting them all into the pot.

Ananse returns home and proceeds to climb a tree, with the aim of placing the pot in the top branches – accessible only to Ananse. The climb to store the pot is problematic as the pot is hanging on Ananse’s chest, impeding his movement. At the foot of the tree, Ananse’s child is observing the struggles of the ostensibly wise, experienced parent and offers a suggestion. The child says Ananse’s climb would be easier if the pot were slung on his back. On hearing this, Ananse pauses and listens to the promptings of his child, the pot and his unconscious. Ananse realises the folly of the enterprise and flings the pot to the ground, where it shatters.

Akan stories about Ananse are known as Anansesɛm, a portmanteau word, the result of two Akan words: Ananse means ‘spider’ and asɛm can variously mean ‘matter’, ‘situation’, or ‘trouble’. When combined, the resulting expression denotes collections of narratives containing a moral. They are gems of ancient ‘wisdoms’ distilled in a manner to make them accessible to all members of society, no matter their age. Ananse, the central character in these narratives, who is an anti-hero, has the ability to shape-shift but only under duress, and no other characters have this power.

The encounter between therapist and client is a complex one, refracting through the personalities of the therapeutic dyad and within the dynamics of culture, race, coloniality and intersecting identities. There are known and unknown points within the shared sociocultural space of these relationships. The therapist and client inch towards and away from each other in curiosity, unfolding awareness, powered by fields of emotions and thoughts. The supervisor enters this matrix with their own wisdom pot of cultural, racial and personal qualities while attempting to provide a framework for the supervisee and themselves to process understanding and learning, and to facilitate openness. The demand on the supervisor can be tremendous, especially the impulse towards omniscience and omnipotence.¹

This article will explore and raise some questions around the economics of power and knowledge and of difference and sameness within the relational supervisory intercultural space. This exploration will highlight the ubiquity of interculturality in many interactions and cultures, ‘the difference [relationally] being a matter of degree’.² In contending with these processes and the associated power dynamics within the supervision and therapeutic setting, the client’s (supervisee’s) needs could be overlooked and neglected. An imaginable way through this contention might be the supervisor’s adoption of a listening position to the promptings of the unconscious.³ How is attunement to the unconscious coaxed so that the tuning of the inner ear can catch and recognise its communications? Bearing in mind this attunement to the unconscious is contiguous with the supervisor’s knowledge, their years of training, experience and authority in interaction with the supervisee who is located as the ‘junior’ partner.

A pathway to elaborating receptivity to the dynamic offerings of the unconscious can also be found in Ananse’s experiences in the tale of the wisdom pot. Within the Akan oral tradition, the stories of Ananse are a source of entertainment and a conduit for intergenerational transmission of value – a forum for interaction and play. The stories are offered with a caveat that they can be received in full or in part and with the hope that the dynamics of receptivity involve the stories interacting with the subjectivity of each listener. There is an implicit invitation in this caveat for the listener to share with the storyteller, after some reflection, the outcome of the story’s cross-fertilisations.

The shattering

In supervision the ‘pot of wisdom’ ought to be spoken to, touched, queried and explored. I invite readers to consider their own pot and its contents. What does this pot in the supervision symbolise? What does it contain? To what extent have the contents been internalised in, largely, unanalysed ways by the individual?⁴ What might the origins of the contents in the pot be? Might these refer to Eurocentric psychoanalytic concepts of human development; the negotiations of conflicts between drives and societal mores or derivatives of this wherein relationships foreground and define our sense of being human, as in object relations?⁵ The pot’s contents may include pre-colonial, cultural, political, pre-enslavement, historical, traumatic, geographical and racial elements and thus present us with considerations about how these realities shape our inner lives.¹

The supervisor and supervisees in their consultations facilitate spaces where clients can be discussed and heard; this contemplation extends to the hinterlands of supervisor and supervisees. It advances and processes the confluence of conscious and unconscious dynamics. This is, in turn, elaborated through the intersections of the culture and race of all dynamic participants in the supervisory encounter.⁶

The relevance of intercultural supervision can be found in the (unveiled and untold) stories of individuals from racially minoritised communities in the UK. These narratives unfold in the supervision as explicated by the therapist from their own subjective location. The question is, through which therapist and supervisor lens are these stories heard, retold, (mis) understood or co-constructed? How are the contemporary and historical experiences of positions as the oppressed, oppressor, discriminated, marginalised or privileged, embodied in their varying fluid rearrangements by the protagonists engaged in the supervision? Global events between the years 2020 and 2022, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on minoritised communities, have been a matter of huge concern, not least in Britain. The murder of George Floyd sharpened public focus on the much greater weight of injustices on racially minoritised individuals and communities, constraining their inner lives. The forces of injustice impose dynamics of identification among racially minoritised individuals and communities, fostering solidarity, alliances and a pooling of resources to contend with structural inequalities in their lived experiences. These shared experiences may also act to hasten the processes and dynamics involved in getting to know another person from the same or similar community. The desire for understanding, identification and the gravitational pull of empathy between the client and supervisee with shared sociocultural experiences could motivate the supervisor to truncate the time taken to get to know the client (and supervisee). This urge, which can lead to misunderstandings, could be decelerated and mitigated by an awareness of the energies present in the pot.

Gordon describes a consciousness which he terms ‘potentiated consciousness’ – one that shifts anti-blackness from a focus on a problematic self to outward movements of critiquing social and racist structures, leading to an engagement with possibilities, options and change.⁷ The wisdom pot consciousness operates in the interstices of the self and other selves, minds and their co-constructions. It is simultaneously in and out, choreographed through advances into the supervisor’s inner landscape and motioning out to the supervisees’ and clients’ terrain, then further out still into the social, political and cultural.

Extracted and edited with permission from ‘Ananse(sɛm): supervisory insights from his shattered pot of wisdom’, Baffour Ababio’s chapter in his edited publication, Intercultural Supervision in Therapeutic Practice: dialogues, perspectives and reflections, recently published by Routledge.