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The psychoanalytic situation with its constructed, clearly defined setting, coupled with a particular kind of attentiveness on the part of the psychoanalyst, sets in motion the most primitive, undigested and traumatic aspects of the analysand's psyche, engaging the psychoanalyst in processing their own experience in the knowledge that what takes place in themselves or in the patient will never be completely within their grasp.
In this chapter I will argue that the essential function of the psychoanalyst is to maintain what I call bi-ocularity as an essential function of the setting, the aim of which is to foster symbolic thinking.
To define my terms. For me, ‘setting’ includes the mind of the psychoanalyst in relation to a Now and a Here. Because the maximal affect and meaning is Now and Here, the setting is one which conjures “a piece of real life”, as Freud put it (Freud, 1914, p. 152); Freud contrasts this with hypnosis which “could not but give the impression of an experiment carried out in the laboratory”. Therefore, Freud goes on, “analytic treatment … cannot always be harmless and unobjectionable” (Freud, 1914, p. 152). While it is a piece of real life – it is happening Now – the setting is indelibly connected to a There. But a There understood as – and this is the essence of the psychoanalytic approach – a reference to the ‘other’ place, that of the phantasy world, psychic reality, the unconscious and traces of the past continually reshaped Nachträglichkeit.
In order to produce this ‘piece of real’ life, the setting needs to be preserved if it is to bring forth the ‘illness’ via the “highly explosive forces” which Freud describes in his paper on transference love
(1915a, pp. 170-171). Within this setting ‘madness’ irrupts. And also ‘psychosis’. I’m using the important distinction made by Green (1986) who links madness to ‘passion’ and Eros, which is not the prerogative of pathology, while psychosis (with its mechanisms of splitting and disavowal) is linked t