ABSTRACT
As a consultation proceeds, things that have happened at the beginning of the session need to be worked over, as patterns of anxiety and conflict, defence, and relatedness repeat and resurface in different forms, again and again. Each time they do, a therapist's picture of the patient acquires depth. In psychotherapy, as in life, all is in movement. A particular form of movement is especially important as an expression of a patient's ways of dealing with anxieties and conflicts stirred by an intimate relationship. Psychoanalytic psychotherapists work from within relational goings-on. One of the most intriguing facets of the psychoanalytic enterprise is to study the interface between what a person passively experiences and what he or she actively generates. Freud considered that a central aim of psychoanalysis is to extend the domain over which a person can exercise agency. To hold as true is to hold as true of reality.
