ABSTRACT
Jean Pouillon has, with a limpid erudition and perspicacity of thought, defined for us the doctor-patient-illness relationship in its social frame in certain primitive societies. One could argue that Freud’s therapeutic frame facilitates processes which, though they have all the attributes of magical practices, entail that willing suspension of disbelief by both parties concerned which makes the participation and non-participation by each a valid and creative experience leading to an increment in the self-awareness and insight of both. Freud had conceptualized an aspect of this by theorizing that one works best in the analytic situation when one works with the resistances of the patient. Toward the tail end of the nineteenth century, when Freud arrived on the psychiatric scene, he found the psychiatric patient either being treated largely as a bizarre social fetish, or endured as a familial nuisance.
