Property, Materiality, Proximity: The Analytic Frame and In-Person Work

Abstract

In-person meeting offers psychologically usable material—signifiers that serve as day’s residue—that cannot be duplicated or substituted for in remote ways of working. Questions of materiality, the history and specificity of location, and bodily proximity all are key aspects of the psychoanalytic frame, as Bleger’s classic formulations attest. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the choreography of engagement between analyst and patient: the ghostly dust in the frame enters the room. As Bleger says, with ghosts so rustled, nonprocess has a chance to become process. Two clinical examples highlight these points about materiality and in-person working. The final section of the paper extends Bleger’s description to tackle the perplexing situation of patients who hesitate to return to the office. Issues of “ghosting,” vanishing, disappearing are discussed, and linked to the constitutive absence that grounds any meaningfully structured presence. This constitutive absence is evoked by the prospect of the return to in-person analytic work. A final clinical example is used to illustrate this disturbing and irreducible fact about human interaction when two bodies are together in a room to discuss, over time, the life of one of the participants.