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Opening remarks, like other sentences that beckon further contemplation, often emerge from mysterious origins. Ideas arrive unbidden; meaning crystallizes unexpectedly. The descriptions that are of greatest psychical use were often originally intended otherwise than they are subsequently applied. These thoughts begin, like great discoveries, as happy accidents, collisions between readily available bits of perceived reality and the emergent capacity to think them. In her efforts to learn from herself — through such collisions — how to paint, Marion Milner (1952) forever altered the theory and practice of psychoanalysis by reinvigorating our understanding of the conditions under which creativity takes place, including the requirements of the psychoanalytic situation, which she renamed, borrowing from painting, “the frame.” Yet despite broad consensus about the profound importance of this frame, its necessity as a prerequisite for analytic work to proceed, description of the concept itself, the mechanism of the framing effect on the psychoanalytic experience is relatively scarce. We know that the frame works, it seems, more than we know why it works. And even the most celebrated and studied (and notorious) experiments with modifying this frame — Ferenczi's elasticity, Eissler's (1953) parameters, Lacan's (1953) scansions, to name a few — have elucidated more about what the frame isn't — rigid, exclusive, or of fixed duration, respectively — than what it is.
Reading Brian Kane's Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice , one may begin to suspect that the arrested theoretical development of the concept of the frame is a problem of language, of insufficient description, which must be borrowed (as Milner did) from a seemingly unrelated field, new words to elaborate an old concept. Indeed, one often hears psychoanalytic writing reaching outside its field of study, toward music in particular, for suitable words — rhythm, pulse, resonance, harmony, tone, vibratio