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30 NOVEMBER 2009
NO 1520
Self-supervision
The episode took place in 1951 at Stanford Lane Hospital, which was then located in San Francisco.
The situation was one in which I felt trapped and immobilized by fear. I was feeling emotional pain, and thought I was threatened with potential physical pain. The past was certainly colouring my perception of the present ...
I was called in at 2 a.m. one Sunday morning to see a patient on the locked psychiatric ward who had suddenly gone berserk. The patient, whom I had not seen before, had been admitted the previous afternoon with a diagnosis of acute schizophrenia. About ten minutes before I saw him, he had removed the wooden moulding from around the door. I looked through the small window in the door, and saw a man six feet four inches tall weighing 280 pounds. He was running around the room nude, carrying this large piece of wood with nails sticking out. and talking gibberish. I really didn't know what to do. There were two male nurses, both of whom seemed scarcely five feet tall, who said, 'We will be right behind you, Doc.' I didn't find that reassuring.
As I continued to look through the window, I began to recognize how scared the patient was, and then it began to trickle into my consciousness how scared I was. All of a sudden it occurred to me that he and I had a common bond that might allow for unity – namely, that we were both scared.
Not knowing what else to do, I yelled through the thick door, 'My name is Dr Jampolsky and I want to come in and help you, but I'm scared. I'm scared that I might get hurt, and I'm scared you might get hurt, and I can't help wondering if you aren't scared too.' With this, he stopped his gibberish, turned around and said, 'You're goddam right I'm scared.'
I continued yelling to him, telling him how scared I was, and he was yelling back how scared he was. In a sense we became therapists to each other. As we talked our fear disappeared and our voices calmed down. He then allowed me to walk in alone, talk with him and give him some oral medication and leave.
GERALD JAMPOLSKY
Jampolsky, G. (1979). Quoted in: Hawkins, P. and
Shohet, R. (2000). Supervision in the helping professions.
Philadelphia. Open University Press. pp. 192-193.
