The “Nesting Phase”: Process or Non-Process in the Psychoanalytic Work?

The conditions of the therapy setting and our particular use of countertransference while working at the frontiers show that certain clinical cases demand that we question and review the classical model of analysis (Freud 1912, 1913, [1940], 1938). This paper examines a variation in the classical setting defined as “face-to-face,” in the treatment of so-called “difficult patients.” These are non-neurotic patients, characterized by a double psychic functioning—predominantly narcissistic—and by a remarkable use of splitting mechanisms. This paper centrally aims at elaborating on ideas related to the concepts of regression, inner setting, transference/countertransference, and some others, by relating them to the ways in which the “face-to-face” setting may be implemented as a technical variation during our psychoanalytic task. In so doing, I hope to contribute further to the conceptualization of the “face-to-face” setting.

We think that an eventual formal integration of this technical variation into the psychoanalytic theoretical/technical scientific corpus may arise from considering its validation as an opening phase in a process that may bear witness to the possibility of applying the psychoanalytic method when working at the frontiers. This opening phase, which I refer to as the “nesting phase” of the analytic process, will eventually lead us to the organization of an analytic field harbored by the classical setting.