Transference Focused Therapy (TFP) is one of the therapies that over time has been strengthened with scientific evidence and enriched with the findings of its learning process. Just as supervision in many therapeutic currents is necessary to help with the application with the theoretical and practical elements necessary to address our patients’ needs, in the case of TFP, supervision is an essential element throughout the therapist’s life. Why is that? Supervision, which means “looking from above”, allows the therapist to see aspects of his or her experience in the session and application of technique that are not clear during the therapy itself. Simply put, too much is being experienced in the therapy session for the therapist to be aware of it all. Supervision combines attention to structure and boundary setting (the macro level, as Luis Valenciano describes it) with a careful attention to the unconscious processes that unfold in the session and how the therapist explores them with the patient in relation to the activated object relations (the micro level). All this is in the service of maximizing the mechanism: enhancing understanding of the transference and the ability to reflect of it and on the deep conflicts that become clear in reflecting on shifting transferences.
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Glauco Valdivieso
Glauco Valdivieso is a Peruvian psychiatrist and psychotherapist who lives and works in Lima, Peru. He has been a psychiatrist since 2018, graduated from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and trained at the Hospital Nacional Victor Larco Herrera. He has training in Cognitive Psychotherapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Mentalization Based Therapy and Transference Focused Therapy, currently in clinical supervision. He is the co-founder and medical director of the Peruvian Institute for the Study and Comprehensive Approach to Personality (IPEP) and of the TFP PERU therapeutic division. He is the founder of the Personality Disorders Chapter of the Peruvian Psychiatric Association (APP) and head of the mental health unit at the Villa El Salvador Emergency Hospital. He is also co-founder and member of the editorial team of the Latin American Journal of Personality together with the Argentine Institute for the Study of Personality and its Disorders (IAEPD). His clinical interests are the treatment of personality disorders and mood disorders, and he wishes to contribute to research on TFP.
Silvia Bernardi
Silvia Bernardi, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. After graduating from medical school in Florence Italy in 2006, Silvia emigrated to the USA to work intensively in neuroscience research, studying the bases of the interaction between emotions and cognition. Silvia completed her residency in Psychiatry at Columbia and has since practiced privately in New York. She trained in Transference Focused Psychotherapy and continues to see patients for medication management and psychotherapy while conducting her research to unlock further knowledge to support the biological underpinnings of TFP and borderline personality disorder.