ABSTRACT
The interpersonal and intrapsychic negotiation of how one find ways to be their selves with one another and accept others on their own terms is a developmental achievement that psychoanalysis may be uniquely situated to facilitate through attention to the vicissitudes of the ongoing negotiation and analysis of that negotiation in the analytic situation. Each analyst must define and refine the relationship between the particular qualities of the frame that Mitchell creates with his patient and the goals and values that guide his psychoanalytic vision. The use of the metaphor of the frame was probably introduced into psychoanalytic discourse in 1952 by the artist/analyst Marion Milner, evoking the image of a picture frame. So in Milner's usage, the creation of a frame represents the analyst's activity in marking off a special kind of space in which certain unusual, quintessentially 'psychoanalytic' kinds of experience may occur, potential space, to use Winnicott's term.
