ABSTRACT
The interest in psychic envelopes reveals a change of perspective: attention is turned away from psychic contents and focused on the containers. The process is based on what he calls the capacity for reverie, which is an intuitive mode of thinking that makes it possible to transform unassimilable feelings into mentally assimilable elements. Anzieu distinguishes essentially between two psychic envelopes, which differ in their structure and their form. The external layer, the stimulus barrier, which he considers as a membrane, is turned towards the outer world. The internal layer, considered as a sensitive pellicule, has a receptive interface function. The analytic frame presents in his view a homology with the structure of the psychical apparatus. The analyst's words about the air that they were breathing sought to name the sharing of a sensation that was enveloping them and to lead to a representation and affect that hitherto were poorly differentiated.
