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Modell proposes that it is not the resolution of the oedipus transference neurosis that brings about change, but the "fundamental psychoanalytic setting." His ideas come from experience in psychoanalysis but apply as well to long-term dynamic and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. He makes this sweeping statement in a footnote and does not follow it up with evidence. By "fundamental psychoanalytic
setting" Modell means what Stone called the "psychoanalytic situation," which includes what Freud referred to as the unobjectionable positive transference. Modell feels that the unobjectionable positive transference plays a much greater part in the process of change than has been acknowledged. It provides a setting or medium through which psychic time can be retranscribed. The ideas of retranscription and psychic time come from Freud and from St. Augustine. Modell feels that had Freud integrated the idea of retranscription with the concept of transference neurosis, he would have clarified the agent of change in psychoanalysis. The separation of the analytic relationship into "real" and "transference," he suggests, is not the most accurate or illuminating way to look at it. He proposes that "the psychoanalytic setting frames a level of reality separate from that of ordinary life, an area of illusion; within this area … there are further transformations (retranscriptions) of levels of reality." With this background Modell suggests that what we observe in psychoanalysis is not an active "regression" to earlier stages of life, but "symbolic actualization," a process that contains many elements of the earliest mother-child relationship. It is through this symbolic actualization that change is made in a retranscription of past time/present time/future time. This is possible because of the "frame," the "rules of the analytic game," created by the analytic setting which includes the physical regularity of the set-up and the emotional constraint of the analyst