IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 61 Where that is leading us is the ‘second mountain’, as Brooks calls the complex procedure life is inviting us to undertake in order to grow and to become what we really are, meaning ourselves. Commitment, considered as such, equals complete and irrevocable dedication to a cause that is greater than the individualistic goals one egotistical (pseudo) self can have and follow. However, in order to clean the psyche from all the detritus of communal life, social psychology, and all sorts of social entanglements, one has to distance oneself from it, to create an inner personalised space, namely a solid self . On such a level it seems that one has to isolate oneself from a lot of things coming from the outside world, especially from its bad, disturbing, and energy consuming influences and intricacies which deviate the spirit from his right way toward some kind of equilibrium or imagined samadhi . What is not very clear, and a great source of confusion, is that in the process one can throw out the baby with the bath water. On the other hand, we are part of the world and as such we cannot throw out our pseudo-self without risking to lose at least a part of ourselves. The question that can be raised is what remains after such a procedure? It is important to see that even from the detachment of philosophical reflections, we are prone to stick to some sort of compromise which extends to the personal level as well as to the family level. We have to understand, as Bowen puts it, that: “The mix of togetherness and individuality into which the person was programmed in early life becomes a ‘norm’ for that person. People marry spouses who have identical life styles in terms of togetherness-individuality.” [18] It becomes evident now that it is about the mix of the two forces, of togetherness and individuality, that we are speaking of and that here lays one of the greatest difficulties in life which extends also to the therapeutic relation as well. There too we have those antagonistic tendencies of togetherness-individuality, and even more than that, we have to take into account the same tension in supervision, namely between to supervised and the supervisor. If we put all the details and concrete intricacies aside, and distance ourselves to a more abstract and rather intuitive level, we can see how problems transport themselves from one level to the next. It all starts with the client arriving in therapy. They come with their problems, transporting them into the therapy room. As such trivial problems of family and of domestic life see themselves upgraded – in the eyes and understanding of the psychotherapist – into systemic or psychoanalytic problems. They are in a way uplifted onto another level and benefit, by that operation of transmutation, of a strange but implicit metamorphosis. And that is not the end! With that problem – already translated from domestic into systemic or psychoanalytic or other psychological perspective – the therapist can have a problem of his or her own. Consequently, they will go into supervision, to clarify or untangle their implication in it. In doing so, the initial problem is elevated to another level of discussion and understanding, which is very far from the concrete domestic problem that is at the origin of such a multi-level process. And now, if we detach ourselves from all that, we could see on every step or level the same dynamic of individuality and togetherness: first between the family members, then between client(s) and psychotherapist, and then between the latter and their supervisor who has probably a family of his or her own … As we can understand from the above-mentioned line of thinking, it is about a continuous dialectic between individuality and togetherness. A process that Bowen named the differentiation of self: