Analytic Framing and Shared Psychosensory Experience

We are aware today of the changes to the analytic frame brought about as a result of the contingencies of carrying on work during COVID. But this has only made more visible what had always been the complex and changeable character of the frame. Long-standing controversies over what constitutes analysis — session frequency, use of the couch, the legitimacy of remote treatment — have tended to obscure the fact that we are constantly involved in recalibrating and reinventing the frame preconsciously or subsymbolically at the “procedural” level of engagement.

While often taken for granted as an unvarying set of arrangements, a fixed exterior structure within which the process of analysis can proceed, the frame itself became an object of interest and study in the work of Milner (1952) and Winnicott (1989), and then in Bleger's (1967) landmark paper, where the frame began to be understood not just as providing a professional setting, but also as serving therapeutic functions.1 I previously outlined the complex makeup of the analytic frame (Goldberg, 2017), with its various functions coexisting in a dynamic tension — functions that include maintaining a confidential professional setting with legal and ethical safeguards, while also providing a contained space of intimate engagement for the specifically psychoanalytic exploration of emotions and unconscious wishes.

Of all the different aspects of the frame, the one I would like to look at in particular in this paper is its function in bringing analyst and patient together at the level of shared psychosensory experience — what I will