ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the present formulation of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Psychotherapy sets its course from the initial interview. The stammering of the first session punctuates the ongoing activities of the patient’s life as he attempts to convey his situation by word and gesture, directed to the unknown stranger who is the therapist. Try to explain all the growing, yearning, frustrating, falling, winning, breaking, twisting, turning, baking, eating, waiting, crying; and the fears, until regular breathing returns after the pain even in explanation. The present formulation is a viewfinder: more or less linking what is necessarily in flux as the metaphorical train careers down its tracks, partaking both of changing views and relatively fixed destinations, also unknown, at least at first, to the therapist. As an interpersonal series, the patient’s presentation followed by the analyst’s articulation of its present formulation and the patient’s receptive use of the present formulation, changes the shape of what becomes possible in ongoing therapeutic emergence.
