ABSTRACT
The “frame” remains an essential reference point throughout any analysis. The essential shape of any given psychoanalytic process, given definition by the frame, is often set forth by the analyst as “rules” or “policies,” typically most explicitly delineated at the beginning of an analysis in the first few sessions. Gregory Bateson’s influential anthropological and ethological studies on frames as containers for divergent realities led him to conceptualize psychotherapy as a kind of frame-repairing enterprise. New frames of reference that apply to physical reality and psychic reality have changed our vantage point for considering a number of psychoanalytic assumptions. Just as physicists came to understand that light has properties of both particle and wave, psychoanalysts began to see that a frame for analysis has properties of both process and structure. Fixed and rigid frame constructions can become impediments to necessary changes in the relationship.
