The Analytic Setting as a Representation of the Internal Mental Structure

Wassily Kandinsky, Black and Violet

The analytic setting as a representation of the mind in a dream-state has been explored by several writers, notably Lewin(1955).He comments that the analytic setting arose historically out of the setting for hypnosis[…]. So there was from the beginning a relation between the structure of the analytic setting and sleep, censorship and resistance. (p. 64)

Freud (1900) himself commented that free association resembles the state of mind that precedes sleep and if the patient on the couch is a quasi-sleeper or a quasi-dreamer, it is free association that represents the uncensored activity of the unconscious, pushing forward to express material which in turn provokes censorship.  The conflict between free association and resistance, so fundamental to the analytic setting, exactly represents the intra-psychic conflict and censorship that give rise to the latent and manifest content of dreams.  The analyst, whose awareness makes bridges between the latent and the manifest material, is in the position of the sleeper’s ego that can articulate the dream work, releasing and organizing the unconscious wishes (Khan, 1974). The analyst works in the reverse direction, however, trying to see through the defences, not keep them in place, and is therefore an “awakener” rather than a guardian of sleep (Lewin, 1955) (p.65)

Andre Green […] has shown how the analytic setting is a representation of the Oedipus Complex:

The symbolism of the setting comprises a triangular paradigm, uniting the three polarities of the dream (narcissism), of maternal caring (from the mother, following Winnicott) and of the prohibition of incest (from the father, following Freud). What the psychoanalytic apparatus gives rise to, therefore, is the symbolization of the unconscious structure of the Oedipus Complex (Green, 1984, p. 123)

One aspect of the analytic situation is the peaceful, reliable environment, the lying down, the invitation to say anything and express any wish or feeling, without censoring it. The analyst who offers these is inviting the patient to regress and be cared for in a state of dependence. But there are other aspects, such as the prohibition on enacting wishes or feelings, the rigour and constraints about session times and payment of fees, and the analyst’s refusal to accept at face value what the patient offers him. This is what Friedman (1997, p.30) call the “adversarial” quality of analysis, and the analyst who embodies it is a different object for the patient from the one that offers regression.

The analyst thus represents two opposite sorts of object at the same time. The patient’s wish is to separate them out and to be able to relate to one of them but not the other. But these two objects have their own relationship with each other. There is a union between them in the person of the analyst, which the patient is not privy to. The patient has to accept this, and find a way of relating to both of them together, despite the wish to keep them apart and establish a special relationship with just one. These two objects are both located, in their externalized forms in the analyst, but they are also fundamental to the structure of the patient’s internal world . (p.65-66)

The nature of the analytic framework […] represents in its own structure the unconscious structure of the Oedipus Complex just as it does the internal state of the dreamer. These examples [...]show what it means for the structure of the psychoanalytic situation to be an external representation of internal psychic structure. (p.66)

Parsons, M.( 1999) Psychic Reality, Negation, Analytic Setting. In G. Kohon (Ed.) The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 59-75), London: Routledge