ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief clinical illustration that gives some idea of the psychical effort that an analyst must make in order to preserve the possibility of neutrality when confronted with the patient's narcissistic attacks. It looks at some of Sigmund Freud's metaphorical representations that have contributed to the construction of the idea of neutrality. They have all to do with bodily representations and are echoed in the bodily metaphors that Freud used in his attempt to give weight to his theory of mental functioning. Ideas such as psychical permeability and penetrability are excluded from representations of how a psychoanalyst listens to his/her patients. Neutrality has just as excessive an aspect as does the transference; it is in contradiction with the ego's usual functioning, and it is a temporary normal illness. Jacques Lacan argued in favour of a kind of psychoanalysis that would not be simply a semblance of analysis.
