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This paper was read at the Second Argentine Psychoanalytic Congress, Buenos Aires, June 1966, and published originally in Spanish in 1967 by the Revista de Psicoanálisis, 24(2): 241–257. This English version is from the 1967 International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 48: 511–519.
Winnicott (1956) defines “setting” as “the summation of all the details of management.” I suggest, for reasons that will become clearer further on, that we should apply the term “psycho-analytic situation” to the totality of phenomena included in the therapeutic relationship between the analyst and the patient. This situation comprises phenomena which constitute a process that is studied, analysed, and interpreted; but it also includes a frame, that is to say, a “non-process”, in the sense that it is made up of constants within whose bounds the process takes place.1
The analytic situation may be thus studied from the point of view of the methodology it stands for, its frame corresponding to the constants of a phenomenon, a method or technique, and the process to the set of variables. Methodological considerations will, however, be left out and they have only been mentioned here to make it clear that a process can only be examined when the same constants (frame) are being kept up. Thus, we include within the psycho-analytic frame the role of the analyst, the set of space (atmosphere) and time factors, and part of the technique (including problems concerning the fixing and keeping of times, fees, interruptions, etc.). The frame refers to a strategy rather than to a technique. One part of the frame
includes “the psycho-analytic contract” which “is an agreement between two people into which enter two formal elements of mutual exchange: time and money” (Liberman, Ferschtut and Sor, 1961).
I am here concerned with the psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame, and there is a great deal in the literature about the need for keeping it up and about the breaks and distortions caused by the patient