The new contexts in which psychoanalysis is practised call into question the concept of the setting as a practical and original tool of the psychoanalytic method to such an extent as to pervert its nature and render it ineffective. The author considers that the setting must be redefined in terms of its intrinsically psychoanalytic functions. She begins with a review of the concept of the setting in the literature, in which it is described both as a set of rules and invariants and as a vessel or the most symbiotic part of the psychic organization. She goes on to suggest a conceptualization of the setting as pre-representational space-time that furnishes the safety and freedom necessary for the patient to acquire the capacity to represent - that is, to permit the emergence of - the elements of his dream potential and to make use of the objects of the psychoanalytic situation (the analyst, words, fantasies, sounds and smells) so as to create a personal world vis-à-vis the other.