ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the essential function of the psychoanalyst is to maintain what it calls bi-ocularity as an essential function of the setting, the aim of which is to foster symbolic thinking. It focuses on one side of bi-ocularity, on the function of reverie and on the more general maintenance of the gap in which otherness resides, and which the author think gets lost in some contemporary, more active approaches. The psychoanalytic situation with its constructed, clearly defined setting, coupled with a particular kind of attentiveness on the part of the psychoanalyst, sets in motion the most primitive, undigested and traumatic aspects of the analysand's psyche, engaging the psychoanalyst in processing their own experience in the knowledge that what takes place in themselves or in the patient will never be completely within their grasp. Transformation in the psychoanalytic situation necessitates the more than literal translation.
