Psychoanalytic setting: regulatory benchmark or work tool?

Abstract: The difficulty of analyzing the setting of the psychoanalytic cure is rooted in the history of psychoanalysis and in the way in which psychoanalysts’ thinking evolved in more than a century of clinical and theoretical attempts of exploring the human psyche. In this paper I’ve tried to capture the forms in which the setting was used in the work of psychoanalysts, not only from a historical perspective, but primarily in terms of how the purpose of the psychoanalytic approach was represented. The working hypothesis is the manner in which psychoanalysts establish their main benchmark that supports their undertaking, directs and organizes the way of relating and using the psychoanalytic setting. But whether we start from the feature of regulatory benchmark or we use the setting as a work tool, the following question remains: how do we understand the curative value of the psychoanalytic undertaking.