Over the past two decades, there have been significant strides towards an improved understanding of race and culture in clinical supervision. Yet, there continues to be less attention directed towards the influence of the contemporary sociocultural context on the lives of supervisees and supervisors. This manuscript explores how race and culture are experienced in supervision amidst ongoing sociocultural traumas and injustice. In particular, I highlight how the key features of psychoanalytic supervision have recently been expanded to include attention to sociocultural dynamics, and then examine how the contemporary sociopolitical context has specific impacts on the lives of supervisees and supervisors. I also underscore the importance of centring the experiences of racial minority supervisees and supervisors, which have remained less visible within scholarship concerning psychodynamic clinical supervision. In an effort to expand prior theorising on racial and cultural dynamics in supervision , I propose further attention to the following areas in psychodynamic supervision: 1) role of unconscious relational processes (e.g. transference, countertransference, and parallel process); 2) the influence of external realities; and 3) the role of vulnerability and humility. The manuscript is a call for a collective mission to integrate race and culture in psychodynamic supervision.

Today, professions and disciplines of all kinds fall over themselves to present their claims as being ‘evidence-based’ in order to garner for themselves the kudos of being a positivist science. In this paperI will critique attempts made by the ‘psy’ disciplines’ (psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy) to use positivism to enter the citadel of science. Amongst other things, I will argue that their efforts have resulted in the corruption and distortion of the principles of (positivist) science. I will argue that positivist methodologies are unable, even in principle, to capture the intricacies of human exchange; in lieu of positivism, notions of emergence and complex responsive processes are more appropriate. Additionally, the argument will also raise questions about the idea of science itself, and claim that much of what passes for science in this territory is a distortion of reality rather than a description of it.

The purpose of this article is to establish dialogue between psychoanalysis, social sciences (philosophy, anthropology, sociology) and politics to analyse the way in which current migratory policies, impact on the bodies exiled peoples who seek to establish themselves in safe territories. This article will look at the ways in which the body of the exiled person is affected by the political, and how they embody the place of a subjective suffering. Different figures of the migrant subject’s body will be discussed. The data comes from varied ethnographic research conducted in France (‘Calais Jungle’, accommodation centres and administrative detention centers). Our interpretations will demonstrate how this body in the process of transit, which swings between extremes of mobility and immobility, appears damaged, wounded, or even at risk of becoming ‘human-refuse’. We will also see that it can be instrumentalised, measured, evaluated, by the institutions that receive it. This body in a state of exile wavers continuously between fragility, vulnerability and destructivity; but it can also, on occasion, show itself to be powerful and life-saving. Indeed, it harbours a surprising strength, and is capable of crossing borders and territories to which it has been forbidden entrance. Thus, it bears witness to the intensity of the human drive to live, even when put to the test of segregational migratory policies.