ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the general issues inherent in the analyst taking up a position and working on the boundary. Boundaries are a pivotal concept in open systems theory and group relations. Psychoanalysis is in many ways a “frontier creature”: it takes place on the boundary between internal and external reality; and it is tangentially related to a large number of bordering disciplines, like the mental health professions, biology, and neuroscience, and numerous specialties within the humanities and social sciences. Good technique is what the analyst has internalised in the course of his personal analysis, professional training, and analytic education, and it has become an intrinsic and integral part of him. It considers some specific boundary issues and their implications for psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Working at the boundary is a concept that enables us to refocus the dynamics of destruction and survival that are implicit and operative.
