ABSTRACT
The audience at a movie exercises two complementary capacities: the ability to give oneself up to the action on the screen, and the ability to extricate oneself from the action to reflect on it. The same two capacities are exercised in analytic therapy, in the form of immersion in fantasy and detached reflection on it. Both situations are designed to encourage the movement between those two positions by the creation of a frame that separates them. This chapter uses movies and clinical moments to show how that frame works or fails to work. A patient who cannot let her imagination go has nothing to analyze. A patient who cannot escape from the conviction of her felt experience has no perspective from which to judge it. The analyst must also be able to move freely in and out of the same frame: She must be able alternately to immerse herself in the action and to step out of it to reflect on it.
