Hire a psychologist in-house, or bring one in from outside?

Demand for specialists in the helping professions is growing fast.

And this is quite natural: with a rapidly changing outside world and global and political events, in a period of turbulence and instability, a great many people need psychological support and professional guidance.

The corporate psychologist.

The corporate sector is also seeing growing demand for psychological help for employees. The number of companies offering their staff corporate psychotherapy grows by about 40% every year.

Psychoanalytically oriented coaches are especially in demand. Applying psychoanalytic methodology to business and career questions is much sought after. However, psychoanalytically oriented coaches often struggle with their professional identity. They find themselves in a situation where a new profession — the psychoanalytic coach — is born at the junction of psychology, psychoanalysis, coaching and business consulting, and leaning too far to one side can seriously blur both the coach’s own identity and their market positioning, making it very hard for clients to understand what is being offered.

This problem arises largely because people come to psychoanalytic coaching with very different backgrounds. For many it is not their first profession, and the move usually happens between the ages of 30 and 50. Besides, a psychoanalytic coach is always tempted to stray into neighbouring areas — to show their professionalism as a consultant here, to slip into a psychological analysis of the client’s case there. The methodology of psychoanalytic coaching is fairly well defined today, but it is described in very few sources, which creates a problem for theoretical training. That is why the practical side of training is especially important for mastering the profession and taking on a professional identity.

There is relatively little research on the identity of the psychoanalytic coach. This is largely because the profession is young: organisations turned to psychoanalysis only in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Brunner describes the essential features of the psychoanalytic coach and of coaching:

The strengths of the psychoanalytic coach and of coaching:

• The ability to hold boundaries and a frame.

• An understanding of the importance of unconscious processes.

• Knowledge of the mechanisms of resistance, transference and countertransference.

• Giving up a dominant position and any direct influence of the coach on the client’s life.

• Confidentiality and keeping to the limits it imposes.

• The ability to work in a three-way position: coach, client and organisation.

From this we can conclude that the identity of the psychoanalytic coach lies in the ability to form, sustain and end the coaching process.

Psychoanalytic coaching itself is an extrapolation of psychoanalytic methodology to organisational and professional questions. The psychoanalytic coach always stands between psychoanalytically oriented, fantasy-based, associative thinking and the business scene — the stage on which the organisational conflicts the client brings unfold. Here lies something of a paradox and the main difficulty of the coach’s professional identity: giving up or resisting psychoanalysis leads to business consulting or classic coaching, while fleeing the business scene turns the process into something like psychological counselling.

Toh and colleagues describe five main tools for building professional identity, which they call the Umbrella:

Mentoring –

“A dynamic, context-dependent, goal-sensitive, mutually beneficial relationship between an experienced professional and a novice and/or students, aimed at advancing the mentee’s development.” Mentoring helps support the mentee’s career, personal, research and academic goals, beliefs, values and motivation by building confidence, discipline, resilience and self-efficacy. Mentoring also supports reflection, which increases career satisfaction, improves work–life balance and reduces burnout and disillusionment.

Supervision –

“An intervention, a working alliance, a method, a process and a professional activity”; “a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a supervisor, attends to their clients and, in a wider systemic context, improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships and continuously develops themselves, their practice and the profession as a whole”; “the provision of guidance and feedback on matters of personal, professional and educational development in the context of a trainee’s experience of providing safe and appropriate patient care.” Supervision’s effects on professional identity include a growing interest in the profession, an influence on career decisions, faster personal development and growth and the development of personal skills, as well as greater career satisfaction. On the social side of professional identity, supervision increases the academic value of research, decision-making skills and competence, and supports the socialisation of professional identity.

Coaching –

“An essentially creative activity of spreading knowledge, wisdom and understanding”; “the coaching process involves asking questions, listening carefully, observing closely, assessing and identifying gaps, giving specific feedback, setting goals, finding solutions, as well as holding to individual accountability, supporting reflection, developing a comprehensive learning plan and ensuring a commitment to learning.” At the individual level of professional identity, coaching influences career decisions and promotes personal development, growth and career satisfaction. Coaching also improves academic, practical and research competence.

Teaching –

“In a professional setting, defined as teaching focused on clients and their needs, usually directly involving students in work with clients.” Individually, teaching increases interest in the professional field, influences career decisions, promotes personal development and growth and increases career satisfaction. Socially, teaching increases academic, practical and research competence.

Instruction –

“Creating and carrying out purposefully designed plans to manage the process by which learners acquire knowledge and understanding and develop skills, attitudes, appreciations and values.” In building professional identity, instruction improves skills and time management as well as practical competence and interaction with clients and fellow professionals.

Combining these methods in the course of professional development gives the best results in acquiring a professional identity.

The professional identity of a psychoanalytic coach has internal and external components. The internal ones include professional self-awareness and self-perception; the external ones, how clients and colleagues see them as a specialist. Experience shows that it takes at least four years on average to acquire a professional identity.

• the ability to notice psychoanalytic elements in the client’s material that relate to the business scene;

• the ability to see the connections between several scenes the client brings;

• knowledge of the basics of the corporate world, the business environment and business concepts;

• the ability to hold on to the client’s request and come back to it, having found new meanings and content somewhere in the depths;

• practice as a psychoanalytic coach;

• the ability to feel emotions and respond to the client’s material without shutting oneself off from it.

Factors that help in acquiring the professional identity of a psychoanalytic coach include:

• Supervision;

• Practice as a coach during the training programme;

• Group work in classes and attending additional events run by the association and by individual teachers;

• Psychoanalytic ethics;

• Psychoanalytic thinking and the ability to see psychoanalysis on the business scene;

• Classes and lectures with leading figures in the profession;

• Taking part in psychoanalytic coaching demonstrations and group work, and analysing organisational cases;

• Wanting to be like the best psychoanalytic coaches;

• Going through psychoanalytic coaching as a client;

• Work in social dreaming matrices, Balint groups and mastermind groups, and attending organisational psychoanalytic psychodrama.

We can conclude that the professional identity of a psychoanalytic coach is the wish and the ability to use psychoanalysis to address clients’ business and organisational questions; the ability to keep the coaching process focused on the request; to combine knowledge of psychoanalytic concepts with lively, dynamic emotions; to cope with one’s own resistance; and to be an individual rather than an imitator.