ABSTRACT
In the early pages of Palimpsests, in 1982, Gérard Genette redefines transtextuality as the subject of poetics, and extends his system of transtextualities into a five-part schema: intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality. The psychoanalytic setting is a spatial construction, but it is also a temporal process. The French psychoanalyst Jean-Luc Donnet has described his interest in the setting as a construction of a site, which can be connected with both space and time, with ‘structure (geography) and history’. But in order to focus on the setting’s temporality and to draw attention to ‘the primacy of the dynamic point of view’, Donnet chooses not to discuss the setting as a site, but to use the term ‘analyzing situation’. An understanding of the setting as a situation rather than a site focuses attention on time, and this is something that another French psychoanalyst, André Green, has examined in great detail.
