ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the issue of the analyst's ability to contain anxieties projected by the patient or to create a safe space for the patient. To tolerate the kind of interpreting the psychoanalysis involves, the patient's mind must feel at home in the mind of the analyst. Psychoanalysis is not a secular religious theory precisely because it requires a personal encounter and because, in this encounter, it is one mind finding a home in another that forms the foundation of the therapeutic action. The patient's internal object representation of self-and-analyst will reflect the patient's imagining of a self-and-analyst living in the mind of the analyst. The patient's mind has to feel at home in the mind of the analyst so that it can unpack itself, face its lifelong fears about standing naked in confusion, guilt, or shame, and use its experience of the analyst's mind as a home base from which to make more emotional contact with the world.
