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My thesis is that psychoanalytic frames are created in an external room of social reality with the aim of elucidating, understanding and formulating the internal, psychological reality that governs our views of ourselves and our relationships with others.
When Edward Shapiro opened the Workshop: The Boundaries are Shifting: Renegotiating the Therapeutic Frame*, he pointed out that the patient needs:
a safe place for the enactment of the symbolic transference, which is recognized and interpreted. Patients have a tendency to shape and change the world in traditional ways, i.e., by repetition and in the transference. These have to be dealt with and understood symbolically and not literally. The analyst has to be able to contain as well as explore, to be managerial as well as interpretative. The analysts have to take in the external limitations into the treatment frame, to confront them as well as the patient's reactions to them and interpret their meaning internally and intersubjectively. The negotiated reality contains the acknowledgment of limited inner and outer resources. The patient is responsible for his own life, while the therapist is reponsible for adherence to the primary task.
What is the analyst's primary task? Psychoanalysis' aims are complex: primarily to facilitate and make possible change, growth and emancipation for the suffering individual. The task is to create a specific relationship within a specific frame where the analysand can gain a more profound