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work has stressed the quality of “squiggle”: “the setting can become an invitation to the patient to participate in a shared area/field of play or co-thinking, where the patient can ‘respond’ in his or her own fashion” (Roussillon, 1995) and which will have a consequence of being either “held” by the analyst or interpreted. The analyst and his setting become a “médium malleable” in the use-of-the-object sense (1988, 1997, 2013). VI. A. Specific North American Contributions and Developments A strand of influential expansion of the Freudian tradition with an emphasis on the psychoanalytic situation/setting/frame as actively and dynamically participating in the ongoing psychoanalytic process can be found in the writings of Stone, Modell and Spruiell. In his classical, yet during his time, revolutionary monograph “The Psychoanalytic Situation” (Stone, 1961), and its sequel “The Psychoanalytic Situation and Transference” (Stone, 1967), Stone presented the concept of Psychoanalytic Setting as organically connected with the dynamic “field of force(s)” it generates (1967, p. 3). In this perspective, the setting unleashes a set of illusions in the form of archaic as well as relatively mature transferences, and an interplay of different temporalities. Robert Langs (1984) wrote about the ideal classical frame as a structural provision, which defines the bi-personal field within which patient’s unconscious communications can safely emerge (and intersect with those of the analyst). Within his ‘communicative’ approach, “Establishing, managing, rectifying, and analyzing infringements on the frame constitute a major group of relatively unrecognized and consistently crucial interventions” (Langs, 1979, p. 12). His rich exposé of the multiple facets of the projective-introjective unconscious communication in the bi-personal multi-vectorial field, which the ‘securely established and maintained frame’ allows to emerge - a link with the capacity for experiences in a transitional space with its emergent dynamic properties and the analyst’s contribution to the patient’s transference - contains many foundational elements of rich contemporary developments, acknowledged or not. Arnold Modell (1988, 1989) broadens the tradition of mining the intra-psychic and relational dynamic forces, which emanate from the centrality of the psychoanalytic setting as a “container of multiple levels of realities” (Modell 1989, p. 9), in view of changing aims of treatment (Modell 1988). In this view, the setting itself includes the quality of bond between analysand and analyst, and presents the dynamic foundation of the psychoanalytic treatment. Following and expanding on Spruiell’s (1983) emphasis on the significance of the “rules of the game”, the “ground rules” and the “frame” of Langs (1979, 1984), and Milner’s analogy to the frame of painting (1952), Modell (1988) considers the “frame” not only as a constraint (Bleger, 1967), but also as “enclosing a separate reality” (Modell, 1988, p.585), and the institution of a unique “contractual as well as communicative arrangement between the two participants” (ibid), generating the illusion of transference, in a way analogous to the creation of illusion in theater. (see also J. McDougall, 1986)
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