2022: Volume 6: Issue 1
■ Sijtze de Roos
The topic of this issue is history. But what is history?
There are many academic papers on the nature of history, but in the end most of these seem to boil down to this: history is something that is ‘made’ today, recorded tomorrow and reflected on the day after, if at all. History itself is subject to history – or to be more precise – historiography is historical and thus subject to debate today, recording tomorrow and reflection the day after.
History is made today. Everywhere. In Ukraine for instance. We have to mention the war against the Ukrainian nation and its people. We cannot introduce this issue without attending to it. It is happening now, nearby, and we want to understand how it affects our friends and colleagues in Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, how they try to go on living, what they need, how we could support them and how it impacts the ANSE community. We all need to make sense of this. In trying to understand what is happening to us, we, too, make history together. Today. To be recorded tomorrow. To be reflected on later.
This is history in the making and we are involved in it, whether we like it or not. We better be aware, though, because, as a well-known saying goes, if we neglect the present we will not understand our history, and if we don’t understand our history, how could we have a future?
If we ever would want to show a picture like this one in the future, we should act today as if the attack on our Ukrainian colleagues is an attack on all of us. After all, are we not confronted, too, with the violation of the core values of our trade?
That is why we have to determine our position, to show solidarity and offer concrete support. That is why ANSE rushed to help. That is why several national member organizations - notably our colleagues from ÖVS (Austria) - are in constant contact with Ukrainian colleagues, organizing relief supplies. That is why the ÖVS opened a centralized donation account, inviting sister organizations to join. And that is why we as editors, on March 2, released a statement saying that “we are saddened and outraged at the unsolicited, unnecessary and unheard of aggression against the free country of Ukraine and the senseless violence perpetrated against its citizens ( )”.
In order to make sense, we need a sense of history. It therefore suits us to present eight articles on various aspects of the history of our trade. Nicolas Mathieu (France) opens the thematic section of this issue with a critical essay on the history of supervision, drawing our attention to the theoretical inconsistencies and practical risks that we all should question to better understand the inherent paradoxes of our present practice. Who will guard the guardians, is his question, how could supervisors be supervised themselves? Louis van Kessel (The Netherlands) goes on to discuss two highly important historical roots of supervision – social work and psychoanalysis – and their effects on the evolution of supervision into a discipline of its own.... ■
