ABSTRACT
Freud’s self-analysis was conducted on two parallel lines: through interpretation of his dreams, and through empathy and insight into his clinical experience with patients. Freud’s self-analysis not only gave us his monumental work on dreams and the theories of infantile sexuality as well as hypotheses on the aetiology of neuroses in infantile psychic life, but it essentially and irreversibly changed the aim of therapeutic endeavours. This chapter examines briefly the concept: ‘the analytic situation’. The total analytic situation can be somewhat arbitrarily divided into three component parts: the patient; the analyst; the analytic setting. The interplay between these three constitutes the analytic process and procedure. In the past three decades a variety of patients have come for treatment who, because of the very nature of their illness, have not been able to use the classical analytic situation constructively. They are compelled by their personality-disorders to fail to fulfil the ‘expectancy’ and rules of the analytic situation.
