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Attunement to the setting itself, broadly conceived dynamically, evolves further in contemporary North American theory, in the Bionian and field theory approaches (Goldberg, 2009; Peltz and Goldberg, 2013), the interpersonal (Levenson, 1987; Stern, 2009) or the relational schools (Aron, 2001; Bass, 2007 and others). Hoffman (2001) for example, following Gill and joining Mitchell and the relational group, wrote about interplay between ritual and spontaneity. He was attentive to the necessity of rules and rule suspensions. José Bleger was read only relatively recently in North American psychoanalysis but Racker (1968) was translated early on, and he was an influence on the intersubjective, interpersonal work developed in the William Alanson White Institute under Sullivan, Thompson, and further in the modern period by Levenson, Mitchell, Daniel Stern and others. Contemporary relational theorists like Bass (2007) see analytic work framed as a space in which there are two persons in a bipersonal field. But Bass, in difference from Langs, stresses uniqueness: “one size never fits all” (ibid, p.12). The here and now is infused with the relational past, a way of thinking with strong affinities with the Barangers and Bleger. Setting, in Bleger’s sense, is more in tune with two-person models of analytic process, including the thought that social, institutional as well as meta-theoretical concerns are played out and operate within the setting. In a way similar to Bleger, Peter Goldberg (2009) has developed a perspective in that he sees the frame/setting in Bionian terms as the structure in which psychotic anxieties are projected and held. In Goldberg’s view, the frame becomes a site into which either analyst or analysand evacuate damaged or psychotic aspects of the self. To understand all the split aspects of the transference/countertransference dynamics in certain cases, one looks to the frame, to the supposedly simple straightforward elements in the frame, or setting, which have been distorted and made toxic via processes of evacuation and projection. The dangerous fragments of self or other may be hidden in the frame, remaining unremarkable and extra- analytic until the analyst can observe and repatriate these split-off fragments back to the living persons in the analytic situation. Grotstein, one of Bion’s earliest and leading proponents in the U.S., developed a concept of the setting where the two participants eventually agree to protect the analytic “solitude”. Here the concept of the setting, as distinguished from the frame, becomes a “sacred” agreement: in establishing the rules of the frame and in the analysand’s acceptance of them, analyst and analysand are establishing a covenant that binds each participant to the task of protecting the third – the analytic procedure itself (Grotstein, 2011, p. 59). Tabakin (2016) has recently made a distinction between the terms “frame” and “setting”. He suggests that the “frame” conceptualization connotes structure, while the “setting” implicates relationship. The idea of the frame-as-structure serves as a guide to gauging and interpreting acting-out against that structure. The setting, as distinguished from the frame, implies the atmosphere that defines the potential transformative effect of the treatment. The setting narrates the shared space between the analyst and the analysand, which becomes a dynamic process of development between the two participants.
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