ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a theory of how formal psychoanalysis, as a going concern clinically, is set in motion. Arnold Modell, in America, and Jean-Luc Donnet, in France, have independently developed theories of how psychoanalysis works. Donnet's thesis is that a sufficiently adequate encounter with that set-up, or analytic site, allows a paradoxical created/found discovery and piecemeal introjection of its elements, revealing the 'rules of the game' that the treatment's logic, ethics and specificity comprise. Modell and Donnet similarly take the psychoanalytic setting to be crucial, and indeed they consider the opportunities inherent in the psychoanalytic setting to be the fundamentally important factor in therapeutic engagement. Clinical vignette illustrates the paradox of the created/found encounter. Acceptance of the parents' relationship to each other, and the adult analysand's acceptance of its symbolic equivalent in respect of his psychoanalyst, is known as the third position.
