In this reflective essay I discuss possible avenues for how the supervisor(s) of a doctoral candidate cancontribute to the candidate’s identity formation as a researcher, and their socialization into a larger academiccontext. I discuss the doctoral education as identity work, relational aspects of the supervision process, andfinally argue that tenets from the self-determination theory can be used as a guiding framework to understandwhich factors and drivers are important in the doctoral student’s identity development process. I conclude bydiscussing how such a framework can be useful for a reflective practice in doctoral supervision.