ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a summing up and concluding comment on the differential theory of therapeutic engagement. Sigmund Freud's challenge or prophecy to psychoanalysts at the 1918 Budapest Congress was that psychoanalysis would one day be extended to the poor, in modified form, on a large scale. The chapter identifies, conceptualises and illustrates a process of therapeutic engagement that can take place in psychotherapy, and in social work, no less than in the psychoanalysis for which it has already been theorised. It shows in practice and on clear theoretical grounds why no ready-made 'psychological-mindedness' is required. The chapter draws attention to four issues: the difference of the theory from the concept of the therapeutic alliance; the factor in free psychotherapy corresponding in function to the fee of private practice; the enhanced sense of subjective agency that results from introjection of the relevant site; and the quasi-autonomous character of the process that introjection of the site sets in motion.
