Moving from empty
speech to full speech:
Taking reflective practice
seriously
Antony Williams: University
of Sheffield
Niall Devlin: Wakefield MDC
Focus of the session
1. Briefly situate the development of reflective
practice.
2. Discuss professional supervision as a site for
reflective practice.
3. Introduce the concepts of empty and full
speech.
4. Discuss their relevance to supervision as a site
of reflective practice.
5. To provide a theoretical framework with which
to examine the link between reflective practice
and professional identity.
The Historical raise of pastoral
roles
 The growth in the pastoral role of the state
was a 20th century western phenomenon.
 Along with increasing urbanisation developed
a number of professions with the remit for
managing and caring for the population,
ensuring and promoting wellbeing, along with
the maintenance of the state.
 Roles within Education, Health and Social
Care
Reflective practice within pastoral
work
Early work by Dewey, then the work of
Schon, reflected cultural changes that
demanded an increasingly reflective stance.
‘Genuine knowledge not just doing or
considering abstractly but through integrating
thinking and doing, by getting the mind to
reflect on the act’ – Dewey in Gordon, 2009, p.49
Supervision as reflective
practice
The organastional structured space to
support and develop the reflective mind.
Two person or group reflective practices
are most often conceptualised and
operationalised as clinical supervision in
the professional practice of the helping
professions (Scaife, 2009).
A question of definitions?
Definitions of supervision in clinical
practice are premised on an understanding
that they increase competence (Loganbill
et al, 1982, p.4); act as a form of education
and training (Falender and Shafranske,
2004, p.3) and ‘perform the functions of
education, support and evaluation against
the norms and standards of the profession
and society’ (Scaife, 2009, p.3)
A contested space
Conceptualisations of supervision have
differed between cultures and professions,
giving rise to the proposition that
supervision ‘is not a uniformed corpus but
a conflicted site’ (Davy, 2002, p. 228)
Reflective and managerial origins
Supervision has origin in managerial
practice concerned with standards and
measures of effectiveness (Page and
Wosket, 1994).
‘Professional supervision’ was originally
practised in the 1920s by psychoanalytic
practitioners in order to review each
other’s work (Carroll, 1996).
The professional context
 "Supervision is what happens when people who
work in the helping professions make a formal
arrangement to think with another or others
about their work with a view to providing the
best possible services to clients, enhancing their
own personal and professional development and
gaining support in relation to the emotional
demands of the work. "
 Source: Joyce Scaife 14th June 2002 University
of Sheffield
“We maintain a separation between
managerial and casework supervision.”
Context: Professional discourse
Focused on examining discourse between
two professional practitioners reflecting on
their professional practice, the type of
organisationally based professional talk
which is the expected stuff of formal
reflective practice processes – i.e. Peer
supervision.
 All relationships provide opportunities for
emotional - identity work (parent-child,
teacher, child, EP-Client). The identity
work is both offered by the emotional work
and produces emotional work. Peer
supervision is both one such relationship
and a way to work through the identity and
emotional work provided by other
professional relationships.
The emotional and identity work is offered
by processes that:
– creates images of a unified, integrated and
stable self in the self/other.
– creates an imaginary self/other structured by
an understanding of how we believe others see
us or wish us to be.
The focus in using a psychoanalytic
framework is to explore the structure of the
text and also explore how the (con)text
structures the speaking subjects.
 Through the application of a Lacanian
Discourse Analysis to the text, key one
Lacanian concept stood out as relevant.
We would like to:
 Introduce the concepts
 Discuss the concepts relevance
Roots of key concept
 Lacan draws on Heidegger’s distinction
between Rede (discourse) and Gerede
(chatter) to elabarate his notion of full and
empty speech (1953 -1955)
Lacan’s topology of the mind
Full speech
Speech which is considered full aims at and
forms the truth such as it becomes established in
recognition of one person by another.
(Lacan, 1970-71)
By speaking to herself, the subject is
transformed into someone else. Through her
‘full speech which performs’ she finds
herself, afterwards other than she was
before’
Characteresied by:
i. Fragmented, dislocated and fleeting discourse
ii. Inconsistency, incoherency of narrative
iii. The struggle to represent ourselves in speech
Empty speech
Empty speech the subject seems to be talking
in vain about someone who can never become
one with the assumption of his desire.
Characterised by
Speech which creates images of a unified,
integrated and stable self.
ii. The creation of an imaginary self structured by
an understanding of how we believe others see
us or wish us to be.
i.
In full speech we learn to acknowledge
the interplay between us as particular
individuals and the universal order that
constitutes and constrains this
individuality.
We can recognise that as unique subjects
we are not only fragments of a
transindividual order but a creative force
that continues to rupture and dislocate
this order.
Emergent methodology
 Originally data/text recorded to support a
project focused on reflecting on a joint
practice experience.
 A way of reflecting on our experience of the
event .
 Afterward became increasingly interested in
the actual point of reflection, rather than the
topic/focus of the reflection, this led to ........
1
 The concepts of full and empty speech
appeared apt descriptors for shifts in the text.
 Inconsistancies appeared to speak to a selfpositioning and practitioner identities work.
 ‘Human language for Lacan... Makes possible
‘communication in which the sender receives
his own message back from the receiver in an
inverted form’ (Parker, 2005, p.174)
2
‘The real is not the realm ‘outside’
discourse that can be identified and
described, but is something that operates at
a point of breakdown of representation at a
point of trauma or shock that is then
rapidly covered over’
Parker, 2005, p.176
Emergent through the analysis
Analysis of text revealed:
– Disagreement
– Discontinuities in discourse, p.21, p.35,
misuse of ‘I’ just before discontinuity.
– Disavowal of difference, coming together to
cover up differing positions.
– Continually shifting shared signifies e.g.
‘those children’, ‘impossible children’
 In our supervision we moved between full
and empty talk as we moved from the
imaginary and symbolic relationship with the
imagined others.

 The utility of a Lacanian lens is to provide a
tool to explore both the identity/emotional
work and as a mirror to professional
roles/practices that facilitated the work.
The power of reflective practice
This is not me anymore, but the text is
me speaking, another probing and me
responding. I was making meaning,
speaking and listening and in the
interplay of metaphor and metonymy, the
me who heard me, was no longer quite
the same me as the one who spoke me.
Ways forward?
 In the local context concepts of empty and
full speech may:
 Be helpful in thinking about the constructive
process inherent in reflection, in training and
in professional practice.
 Highlight the need for reflective spaces that
are apart from mechanisms of accountability.
 Illuminate how supervision may be used as
an opportunity to enhance the potential for
self-determination and an understanding of
the practitioner in their practice.
Caution
A process that is not for everybody, but may
be an important opportunity for some.
Key references
 Carroll, M. (1996). Counselling Supervision:Theory, Skills and Practice.
London: Cassell.
 Driver, M. (2005).From empty speech to full speech? Reconceptualising
spirituality in organisations based on a psychoanalytically-grounded
understanding of the self. Human Relations 58: 1091-1110.
 Gordon, M. (2009). Towards a pragmatic discourse of constructivism:
reflections on lessons from practice. Educational Studies, 45, 39-58.
 Parker, I. (2005). Lacanian discourse analysis in psychology: Seven
theoretical elements. Theory and Psychology, 15, 163-182.
 Page, S. and Wosket, V. (1994) Supervising the Counsellor. A cyclical
model, London: Routledge.
 Scaife, J. (2009). Supervision in clinical practice: A practitioner´s
guide. (2nd edition). London: Brunner-Routledge.