ABSTRACT
Fred Sandback’s minimalist works are colorful structures made of yarn or string, often in the shape of rectangles or squares configuring the image of a frame. These frames constructed from string are suspended in space and bracket an area, giving it a designation. The frame is both an arena of safety, where the most private dimensions of human experience can be expressed and addressed, and an area of meaning, a designation, an available referent for analytic work. The analyst is always part of the frame, the frame is inextricable from transference meanings ascribed to the analyst. The frame is imbued with the analyst’s function and in no small way, when referred to meaningfully, simultaneously conjures the analyst’s role as witness in analysis. For an analysis to proceed something must act as a frame—something that implicitly and explicitly binds the setting.
