ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is not psychoanalysis just because two people are talking on a regular basis or one is lying on a couch and the other behind. To be psychoanalysis there has to be a setting, a frame. This necessarily implies a theoretical structure defining it, which comes from outside. In other words, as Dana Birksted-Breen wrote in her introductory foreword, the two-person situation has a theory as its ‘third object’. This is why the theories underlying how the analyst listens, thinks about the patient and intervenes, which may vary with practitioners but must always be there in at least implicit form, are an inherently necessary feature: defining, so to speak, the model with which the practitioner works.
