ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the essential features of the psycho-analytic situation. The total analytic situation, as arranged and established by the analyst for his patient, functions in terms of: the analytic setting; the transference; interpretations. The analytic setting provides space, time, and the presence of the analyst towards the clinical process, and the experiential yield from this for the patient is ‘holding’ from Winnicott’s theory of parent-infant relationship. Winnicott uses this concept to denote not only the actual holding of the infant, but also the total environmental provision prior to the concept of living with. The whole of the psycho-analytic theory of analytic technique is more or less centred on explicating the different modalities of knowing through interpretation and transference. The word ‘counter’ in the concept counter-transference is most significant, because it establishes the fact of the separateness of the analyst from that which he is identifying and empathizing with in the patient’s experience.
