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It has often been the case that the reaction to the challenge of epoch-making social changes and to the new forms in which psychic suffering has manifested itself over time, has broadened and advanced psychoanalytic theory and technique, sometimes producing fruitful revisions. This happened in Freud's time, has been repeated for successive generations of psychoanalysts, and we should hope that it still happens today.
In fact, one of the founding characteristics of psychoanalysis, whatever some of its detractors may say about it (unintentionally helped by defensive postures which the psychoanalytic movement has not always been able to resist) is that of cultivating a distinctive, cogent relationship with the social and historical reality of its time; besides being inescapably immersed, like any discipline, in the social context within which it operates, the requirement of such a context is essential to its method. Being itself centred on the participation of the analyst and patient in a sort of ‘ludic fiction’ capable of furthering transformations in the direction of the symbolic, it follows that the indispensible vessel for this fiction, provided by the semi-permeable membrane of the setting, must be capable of making present - duly filtered