ABSTRACT
This chapter is an account of a treatment in which both frame and focus are kept adapted when a patient’s needs and mine were changing over the eleven years worked together in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Since Freud reported the case of Little Hans, psychoanalytic theorists, scientists, and clinicians have written voluminously about the psychodynamics of the mother-infant relationship and its treatment. Mary’s analysis has helped her to sort out and label her feelings, reclaim projections, and acknowledge and suffer reality. The analytic relationship and setting function together as a safe external container which, when internalized, strengthens the internal sense of containment, and strengthens the contact barrier. The chapter describes a long-term treatment of a woman which started as a twice-weekly psychodynamic psychotherapy and transitioned to a telephone therapy, telephone psychoanalysis, and finally a four times weekly analytic conjoint mother-infant treatment with a psychoanalytic perspective following the birth of her daughter.
