IJSP Number 5, 2023

35 SUPERVISION AS A SPACE OF CREATIVE FREEDOM – CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE BÖHM Angelika 1 1 Austrian Association for Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy (OeAGP), International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA) Email: angelika.boehm@oeagp.at Abstract The concept of Creative Freedom was passed on by Gestalt psychology, where it still serves as the basis for a scientific approach to clarifying the conditions for creative processes in human beings. It is not essentially about promoting, forming, or even training any abilities, but about supporting, and providing conditions under which such abilities can unfold in living processes, as they are given in psychotherapy and supervision. In this article this concept will be explained in more detail, its conditions will be described and for the first time applied to the special situation of supervision. A close examination of the application of this concept to the field of supervision has shown that its implementation can be quite fruitful. Key words: supervision, Gestalt psychology, creative freedom, self-organization, Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy 1. INTRODUCTION Supervision as a method of reflection and important accompaniment in the professional context illuminates job-related situations from different perspectives in a setting in which at least two people are involved. It thus includes relational, teaching-advising, controlling, and supporting components and so requires frameworks that are addressed in different models of supervision with varying emphasis. Gestalt psychology provides a concept that can support such models in a way insofar as it aims at the specificity of the interpersonal situation in the supervisory context, in which the supervisee is encouraged in his self- empowerment. Gestalt psychology, correctly the “Gestalt psychology of the Berlin school”, emerged in the early 20th century as a distinction from the associationism, atomist, reflexology, and behaviorist trends then prevalent in psychology. It was one of the leading and most internationally renowned directions in scientific psychology at that time and developed as a new way of looking at thinking, learning and action. Research topics of the Berlin School were by no means, as often shortened, only perception-psychological topics, but from the beginning also psychological questions of thinking and learning, also basic questions of experience, motivation and acting, as well in social contexts and under special conditions. The research methodology combined phenomenological approaches with experimental