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The description of the setting given under the heading «Historico-critical remarks» in the contribution of Fausta Ferraro and Celestino Genovese published in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi in 1986 stresses its institutional aspects. The setting is stated to be:
[…] an elusive concept that is paradoxically not readily definable, yet necessary. It is surprisingly difficult to find the term in subject indexes; and it will indeed be sought in vain in any dictionary of psychoanalysis (Laplanche, Pontalis, 1967; Rycroft, 1968). Preference is often given, especially by English-language authors, to the use of terms such as «practical procedures,” which are then enumerated individually, or the «psychoanalytic situation», which, however, cannot be deemed synonymous with it since the setting is a part but not the whole of that situation (Bleger, 1967[a]; Turillazzi Manfredi, 1979). In other words, notions of the setting range between a reductive sense, involving mere technical, albeit indispensable, measures, and one that is so extensive that its particularity is lost. It is therefore appropriate to take as one's starting point a very general definition, closer perhaps to the encuadre of the Argentinians or the French cadre analytique, which denote the set of formal and contractual conditions that serve as a frame for the analytic work and render it possible in a specified spatio-temporal context (Ferraro, Genovese, 1986, 96, translated).
Views on the setting have subsequently taken on greater breadth and depth, the emphasis being principally on two aspects:
the setting as a set of rules and invariants, a condition that is essential to the development of the psychoanalytic process and can be modified in accordance with the situation and the patient, while remaining a set of rules and procedures;
the setting as a vessel for the most symbiotic part of the psychic organization, of which one becomes aware at times of crisis: a fusional, viscous entity or meta-ego that is not necessarily