ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a series of reflections about care-giving institutions and their therapeutic functioning, and to link them with the issue of therapeutic work in institutions, especially by psychotherapists, and the particular way that therapeutic space is constructed within such settings. The notion of transference to the setting or institution is an attempt to define the particular investment in the setting itself and the specificity of those aspects of the subject’s history that are replayed in it. The idea is that a specific psychic problem tends to be displaced onto the setting rather than onto anything else, and this is related to the setting’s particular psychic function: it symbolizes symbol-forming activity. The setting that actually yields understanding is the institution as a whole, and what is played out specifically in psychotherapeutic space can often only be fully understood with reference to what is going on elsewhere and with other people.
