ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the psychoanalysis of the psychoanalytic setting and there is a considerable literature on the need to maintain it and on the disruptions and distortions that the patient provokes in it in the course of any analysis. The phenomenon of the reactivation of symptoms described at the end of psychoanalytic treatment is also due to the mobilisation and regression of the ego through mobilisation of the meta-ego. The negative therapeutic reaction or ‘pact’ is the perfect installation of the patient’s non-ego in the setting and its non-recognition and acceptance by the psychoanalyst. In using the familiar form of address, the patient superimposed his ‘own setting’ on that of the analyst, but in reality he was annihilating the latter. It is proposed to consider the analytic situation as the totality of the phenomena included in the therapeutic relationship between the analyst and the patient.
