Shadows of Psychotherapy: On Mourning the Lost Chair

Abstract

Although converting face-to-face psychotherapy to psychoanalysis with the same patient has become a common clinical fact, its process is rarely described in the analytic literature. This article defines this process as an example of frame modification and tries to analyze different levels of psychic work implied for the patient by such a change. A clinical illustration demonstrates the reprocessing of what a patient can defensively deposit in the initial frame of psychotherapy and the remobilization into the transference of previously silently enacted fantasies.