ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to examine ideas of space between therapist and patient, using Alice Balint’s and Winnicott’s thinking on space in relationships and its significance in the consulting room. Vignettes from work with four patients are cited, to bring the author's thinking to life. The chapter shows that the type of space created by patients in the author’s consulting room will be a repetition of the way they have experienced the spaces in their infantile relationships. The infant/patient sought either ambivalently clinging relationships or a wish to master skills including those of relating, only in order to return to a safe distance—a friendly environment devoid of threatening objects. psychoanalysts task in therapy is to recognize and examine the spaces, gaps, and gulfs between ourselves and their patients, and to attempt to understand what has created these sometimes defensive and frightened stances that occur between psychoanalysts.
