Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis

Its Function and Structure in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theory

Isaac Tylim, Adrienne Harris, Isaac Tylim, Adrienne Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138943438
• eBook ISBN: 9781317373148
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis explores the idea of 'the frame' at a time when this concept is undergoing both systematic revival and widespread transformation. It has always been tempting to see the frame as a relatively static, finite and definable feature of psychoanalytic work. At its most basic, the frame establishes agreed upon conditions of undertaking psychoanalytic work. But as this book shows, the frame has taken on a protean quality. It is sometimes a source of stability and sometimes a site of ethical regulation or discipline. It can be a place of imaginative mobility, and in certain analytic hands, a device for psychic work on projections and disavowals.

Beginning with a seminal essay on the frame by José Bleger, this book includes commentary on that work and proceeds to explorations of the frame across different psychoanalytic theories. The frame is perhaps one of the spots in psychoanalysis where psyche and world come into contact, a place where the psychoanalytic project is both protected and challenged. Inevitably, extra-transferential forces intrude onto the psychoanalytic frame, rendering it flexible and fluid. Psychoanalysts and analysands, supervisors and candidates are relying increasingly on virtual communication, a development that has effected significant revisions of the classical psychoanalytic frame. This book presents a dialogue among distinct and different voices. It re-examines the state and status of the frame, searching for its limits and sifting through its unexpected contents whilst expanding upon the meaning, purview and state of the frame.

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in how best to understand the frame and to use it most effectively in their clinical practice.

Introduction to Chapter 1

José Bleger and the psychoanalytic setting¹

John Churcher and Leopoldo Bleger

The setting is the subject of one of José Bleger’s best-known papers. Published in 1967 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis under the title ‘Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame’, it was originally published earlier that year in Spanish as an integral chapter in his book Simbiosis y ambigüedad (Bleger, 1967a, 1967b), where it was titled ‘Psicoanálisis del encuadre psicoanalítico’. The book is now available in English as Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Bleger, 2013 [1967]) and the version of the paper that is reproduced here is taken from this edition, where we have translated the title as ‘Psychoanalysis of the psychoanalytic setting’.² It is a paper towards which many lines in his own work lead and from which many others stem. Its contents are rather condensed, however, and at first sight they can seem unnecessarily complicated. We hope to show that it is not a matter of unnecessary complication, but rather that an unavoidable complexity lies behind an apparently simple situation.

The context: Argentinian psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s

Bleger’s paper provides a good example of a thread that runs throughout Argentinian psychoanalysis, which is its strong interest in ‘concrete’, or situational, aspects of clinical work. The founders of the Argentinian psychoanalytic group were interested not only in the ‘classical’ clinical practice of psychoanalysis but also in its application to problems such as psychosis, psychosomatic illness and childhood difficulties, as well as in group work and work with institutions. In the years between the fall of Perón in 1955 and the military coup of 1976, there was a remarkable burgeoning of intellectual and artistic life in Argentina, in which the development of psychoanalysis was not an isolated phenomenon.

A crucial influence in the mainstream of psychoanalysis in Argentina and Uruguay between the 1950s and 1970s was the work of Melanie Klein and her followers. The commitment of the first Argentinian psychoanalysts to all aspects of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis was one of the main reasons for their rapid adoption of Melanie Klein’s ideas and those of her followers, and in particular of the concept of projective identification which became such a powerful clinical tool for enabling the analyst to make interpretations which could set the treatment on the path of symbolisation and psychic work. This led naturally to important exchanges with the British Psychoanalytical Society, despite the difficulties of geographical distance that were much greater in those days.

No less important to the development of psychoanalysis in South America during this period was the role played by Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a psychiatrist of French-Swiss origin, a man of wide interests and a gifted teacher, who was a formative influence on José Bleger and all of his contemporaries. Pichon-Rivière and his colleagues developed group and institutional methods for the treatment of psychotic patients, and for thinking about the group and the institution (see: Bleger, 1966; Tubert-Oklander & de Tubert, 2004). Some of Pichon-Rivière’s concepts are exemplified and developed by José Bleger in Symbiosis and Ambiguity, including: the ‘link’ (vinculo); the distinction between ‘depositor’, ‘depository’ and ‘deposited’ in the process of projection; and the three ‘areas’ of mind, body and external world.

Meanwhile, the concept of the countertransference was also growing strongly in importance with Enrique Racker in Buenos Aires and with Paula Heimann in London. It may be that the way in which countertransference came to be so important for the Argentinian psychoanalytic movement is connected with the everyday reality of Argentina, where politics touches all aspects of life, from the most public to the most intimate. As in other countries in which democracy is not firmly rooted historically, politics is felt to be omnipresent: you cannot get away from it. In such an environment you are forced to try to understand what someone else is trying to make of you, what the current political reality is in the process of turning you into at each moment, in order to be able to distinguish among the various elements that are in play, and thereby to be able to discriminate something of your own position.

This is also the predicament in the consulting room. In an earlier chapter of Symbiosis and Ambiguity José Bleger (2013 [1967], p. 91) wrote: ‘The transference interpretation must refer to what the patient does with us at each precise moment, what the patient rejects, accepts, expects, etc., including determination of the affect that is present’.

From the session to the setting

The combination of a clinical orientation with an omnipresent political awareness perhaps explains the strong interest, mentioned earlier, in ‘concrete’ aspects of clinical work. We mean, for example, such aspects as the ‘analytic situation’, the session, the contract, the setting. In 1957 Bleger wrote a paper on ‘The psychoanalytic session’, which can be seen as a precursor of his paper on the setting a decade later (Bleger, 1958, Ch. 6). The 1957 paper builds in particular on Pichon-Rivière’s notion of the psychoanalytic process as a ‘spiral’, in which interpretations serve to break open the closed circle of repetition compulsion, as well as on Racker’s work on the countertransference and on a critique of the notion of instinct by the French philosopher George Politzer (1994 [1928]; 1965–66).

Briefly we could say that the 1957 paper examines the psychoanalytic situation from a ‘dialectical’ perspective, which emphasises its openness to development and change, whereas the 1967 paper on the setting approaches the same situation more from the perspective of repetition compulsion, the operation of which can be seen more clearly by exploring the functioning of the setting.

The paper on the setting

Until recently, knowledge of José Bleger’s work in the English-speaking world was based almost exclusively on his paper on the psychoanalytic setting. Although it has been for some time a classic among writings on the setting, its isolation from the clinical and theoretical context in which it originally appeared in Spanish, as well as some serious deficiencies in the 1967 translation, meant that English readers were for a long time denied an opportunity to make a proper assessment of his distinctive contribution to psychoanalysis. The English edition of Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Bleger, 2013 [1967]) seeks to remedy this situation by restoring the paper to its original context. As the sixth and final substantive chapter of the book, it represents not only an approach to the particular problem of psychoanalytic technique that is presented by the analysis of the setting, but also a culmination and synthesis of work described in the preceding five chapters which enable this problem to be seen in its wider psychological and institutional context.

Bleger considers the psychoanalytic setting from a number of different viewpoints at the same time. He begins by defining the psychoanalytic situation as comprised of an analytic process and what he calls a ‘non-process’. This ‘non-process’ is the setting, which as far as possible is held constant and within which the analytic process occurs. The relation between the process and the setting is also described in Gestalt terms as a figure-ground relation, the process being the figure and the setting being the background.

Sometimes the setting changes from being the background to being the figure, from being a non-process to being a process, but only when something happens to make us aware of its existence. Such changes are usually temporary, because as clinicians we seek to maintain or restore the setting, to return it to the background, so that we can continue to observe and analyse the process that is occurring within it. However, Bleger indicates that he is interested specifically in the function of the setting when it is not being noticed, when it remains as background. As he succinctly puts it, ‘The problem that I wish to examine is the problem of those analyses in which the setting is not a problem. And I want to do this precisely to show that it is a problem’ (2013 [1967], p. 229).

The ‘problem’ that he believes can go unrecognised is that something has been deposited in the setting and remains hidden there as long as the setting itself is not analysed. To understand what this something is, we need to consider a cluster of interdependent ideas in his account which derive from his work on the psychology of social institutions, building on work by Pichon-Rivière and by Elliot Jaques.

The setting as institution and as part of the body schema

First, the psychoanalytic setting can be regarded as a certain kind of institution. He writes: ‘A relationship that lasts for years with the maintenance of a set of norms and attitudes is precisely the definition of an institution’ (2013 [1967], p. 230). Second, the various institutions in which someone participates form parts of his or her individual personality, so that personal identity always has a group or institutional aspect. Third, institutions also enter into the determination of the body-schema, and the setting is no exception. This last idea, which is perhaps the least obvious one, is introduced initially by way of an analogy: just as in neurology the body schema reveals itself in the phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ following an amputation, so the psychoanalytic setting makes its presence known only when it is broken or disrupted. However, for Bleger this is more than an analogy. He writes:

The setting forms part of the patient’s body schema. It is the body schema in the part where this has not yet been structured and discriminated. This means that it is something different from the body schema in the narrow sense of the term: it is the undifferentiation of body and space, and of body and environment.

(2013 [1967], pp. 238–239)

Now this statement is somewhat obscure, even in the original Spanish, but its meaning becomes clearer when the chapter on the setting is read in the context of the book as a whole. The normal, silent, continuous presence of the setting offers the patient an opportunity for a relationship at a bodily level that reproduces an early symbiosis of the infant with the mother, in which there is as yet neither an object nor even a part-object, and no differentiation between good and bad, internal and external, ego and nonego. Instead of a real object-relation there are only various ‘ego-nuclei’ together with the objects to which they correspond. These nuclei and their objects exist psychologically but they are not yet differentiated, because the splitting that will later characterise the paranoid-schizoid position has not yet occurred.

Symbiosis, undifferentiation and the glischro-caric position

In the early chapters of Symbiosis and Ambiguity, the emphasis is on symbiosis, whereby part of the mind is projected into a ‘depositary’ in the external world, who thereby comes under pressure to play a role; in other words, it is described as operating by means of projective identification. In the infant’s case, the depositary is primarily the mother; in a fully symbiotic relationship between adults, such as the one he analyses in a novel,³ ‘the projections are crossed, and each person acts according to the compensatory roles of the other’ (2013 [1967], p. 14).

Symbiotic relationships thus involve an unconscious phantasy of total dependence. The first chapter of the book is a detailed study of dependence and independence in a young woman suffering acute difficulties in separating from her family. The clinical material brings out the coexistence in the transference of symbiosis and autism: in symbiosis the receiver of the projection, the depositary, belongs to the external world, whereas in autism it belongs to a zone of the patient’s own mind or body.

It is important to note that for Bleger, ‘undifferentiation’ is not simply the absence of differentiation; it implies a certain structure and organisation. Prior to the paranoid-schizoid position as described by Melanie Klein, he argues, there is a more primitive position, whose characteristic defences are immobilisation and fragmentation,⁴ and which symptomatically gives rise to confusional rather than persecutory anxiety. He calls this the ‘glischro-caric position’, from the Greek words for viscosity, or adhesiveness, and for nucleus. The hypothesis is grounded in observations by both Klein and Rosenfeld of confusional states as normal phenomena of early development, but he attributes these to an original fusion or lack of discrimination.

The relational structure of the glischro-caric position persists into adulthood in what he calls the ‘agglutinated nucleus’, and he explicitly equates this with what Bion had called ‘the psychotic part of the personality’. Throughout life, this nucleus remains ready to form new symbiotic relationships characterised by massive projective identifications. It is this nucleus, Bleger argues, that is silently deposited in the setting, where it remains hidden and unanalysed, until a disruption of some kind causes it to become manifest.

As long as the setting is not disrupted, it remains unnoticed. The psychotic part of the patient’s personality, the undifferentiated and unresolved infantile symbiotic relationship, remains deposited in the setting. Like a phantom limb that has not yet been experienced because the body is still intact, it silently persists in the setting as a ‘phantom world’, undetected but nonetheless psychically real. The setting thus forms a tenacious and invisible ‘bastion’ (Baranger & Baranger, 1961–62), a refuge or retreat for the psychotic part of the personality, which demands that nothing shall change. José Bleger observes that precisely because the setting is so much respected and preserved in psychoanalysis, much of this area of the mind may never be analysed.

Analysing the setting: the ‘two s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the frame
• Introduction to Chapter 1: José Bleger and the psychoanalytic setting
• 1 Psychoanalysis of the psychoanalytic setting
• 2 José Bleger and the relevance today of his dialectical frame
• PART I Comparative models of the function of the frame
• PART II Frame, culture, politics, terror
• PART III Variations in the frame
• Index