ABSTRACT
The approach to and departure from the analytic hour is a ritual integral to the therapeutic phenomenon that shapes the analytical experience. This chapter explores how this ritual “frames” what occurs in therapy and helps facilitate what desires or is waiting to emerge in each session. The need for analysts to move analysis online, occasioned by the global pandemic, has seriously disrupted the typical ritual framework. A silkscreen labyrinth hangs from the wall near the fireplace. Looking back, these significant sessions, however, feel more like interspersed and scattered isolated events. It’s more complicated, more challenging, threading them together and integrating the experience into the author life. Online therapy doesn’t sink in and take root in the author psyche the way in-person sessions do, sessions that are framed by the benefit of an extensive framing ritual.
