ABSTRACT
Generally, psychoanalytic therapy involves patient and therapist meeting on a regular basis, in the same place for 50-minute sessions from once to five times a week. This chapter describes some of the reasons for the insistence on maintaining constancy in the psychoanalytic setting. It shows how certain aspects of the setting are crucial for the psychotherapeutic process to develop. Ellenberger put the development of psychoanalysis into the context of a long history of the development of dynamic psychiatry. Etchegoyen quotes an interesting formulation by Bleger who suggests that there is always a psychotic aspect of the transference that takes advantage of the stability of the psychotherapeutic setting to remain mute, going unnoticed. Freud, writing about technique in the 1920s, was most concerned about the problems of handling erotic transference and included the countertransference in his observations, when discussing the abstinence required by psychoanalysts.
