ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a dialogue among distinct and different voices. It explores several views of the frame emerging from distinct psychoanalytic orientations. The book considers the question of the frame in the context of conditions and phenomena that challenge conventional presentations and uses of the frame. It also explores psychoanalytic work taking place in conditions of socio-political violence, or social disruption, as well as in the context of complex new technologies of surveillance and communication that challenge every psychoanalyst to consider the frame not as a fetish but as a condition. The book outlines particular experiences of the variation and multiplicity of the definitions and uses of the psychoanalytic frame. It examines the history and longstanding theorizing of the concept of the frame.