ABSTRACT
The concept of the analytic surface, which has been with us since Freud's earliest clinical writings, 1 has recently received notice as a means of identifying the focus of the analyst's attention and interventions. Thus Gray (1986) writes, “I regard as an optimum surface for interpretative interventions a selection of those elements in the material that may successfully illustrate for analysands that when they were speaking, they encountered a conflict over something being revealed, which caused them involuntarily and unknowingly to react in identifiably defensive ways” (p. 253).
