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The psychoanalytic room

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Susanne Lunn
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 Scand Psychoanal. Rev. ( 2002) 25, 135-142 Copyright 2002
---THE---
SCANDINAVIAN
PSYCHOANALYTIC
REVIEW
/SSN 0106-2301

The psychoanalytic room

Susanne Lunn

In this paper, psychoanalysis is viewed as a method in opposition to the

reigning spirit of our age with its demands for fast and measurable results.
The concept "the psychoanalytic room" is introduced in order to grasp the
uniqueness of psychoanalysis and how it distinguishes itself from what is
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ordinarily held to be included under the category of work. The psychoanalytic

room is explored in both a concrete and metaphoric sense and is discussed in
relation to the concept of time, reality, Ogden's concept of the analytic third,
and, inspired by Winnicott, children's play. The playroom of the child and
its similarity with the analytic room is illustrated by the book "Benny's
Bathtub" by the Danish author Flemming Kvist MliJI/er.

Key words: the psychoanalytic room - the concept of time -play - the ana-
lytic third

Psychoanalysis is dead. Freud is dead - this is
what is sometimes said and more and more fre-
quently heard - and, admittedly, the latter is a fact
that in its literal sense can hardly be denied. But
what is meant by saying that psychoanalysis is
dead? That it is passe, old-fashioned, out of date.
Some might say that it is so and they may not be
entirely wrong.
Perhaps it is the fate of psychoanalysis to be out
of date. To the bigoted citizens in Freud's days, the
focus on sexuality - especially children's - ap-
peared very provocative. Today, when it is more
provocative to ask people who they vote for than
how their sex life is, it is not so much the psycho-
analytic sexual theory which provokes people -
but, then, what is it?
Here the old-fashioned aspect of psychoanalysis
comes in. We live in a time where there is a great
demand for fast, visible and measurable results. In
that light, psychoanalysis seems inefficient, slow,
boring, frustrating, hard to measure and technolo-
gically reactionary. Think of a psychoanalyst giv-
ing a lecture: no slides, no overheads, but words.
And in the analytic room - no tape recorder, no
video camera, to say nothing of workshops, which
psychoanalysis is not at all suited for. But then
what is it suited for? What is the idea? Why would
one want to deal with it?
For psychoanalysts, the answers to the above
questions may seem obvious and superfluous.
What I will try to do in this paper is to approach
them through the lens of the concept "the psycho-
analytic room" 1 This concept has much in com-
mon with "the psychoanalytic frame" and "the
psychoanalytic relation" among other concepts,
and to introduce it implies the risk of repetition
and redundancy. The reason for taking this risk
is that psychoanalysis is so distant from what is
ordinarily expected of it and understood with the
activity of work and treatment, that many differ-
ent metaphors can be needed and useful to capture
its elusive character and uniqueness.
THE CONCRETE ROOM
The psychoanalytic room can be understood both
in a literal and symbolic sense. Literally, it de-
1 There is a slight difference of the use of the word "room"
in English and Danish. The meaning of the Danish word
is broader and more inclusive and is used as a combination
of the two English words "room" and "space".
 scribes the concrete room in itself and the way it
is furnished. Within psychoanalysis, there are tra-
ditions for the arrangement of the analytic room
in order to limit traces of the analyst's inner and
outer life together with other intrusive outer sti-
muli. First of all, this is seen in the special physical
arrangement where the analyst and the patient are
placed outside each others' field of vision with the
patient lying down and the analyst sitting behind
the head of the couch. The rationale for this ar-
rangement is well-known. When two people talk-
ing are placed in a traditional position in front of
each other, they will constantly be adjusting and
adapting their communication and mutual reac-
tions to each other. The psychoanalytic arrange-
ment reduces the possibilities for such a social cor-
rection and helps both the patient and the analyst
to concentrate on him or herself, the other and the
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conscious as well as the unconscious communi-
cation between them. At the same time, the pos-
sibilities of other kinds of distractions and atten-
tion to objects in the room are diminished. In this
way, a structure of encouragement is created - an
encouragement to let the unconscious make itself
heard.
However, anybody who has tried to organise
such a room knows that however neutral one has
tried to be and however neutral the arrangement
might seem to outsiders, the psychoanalytic room
itself contains, even at this concrete level, far more
than just the physical, material room and its furni-
ture. What I am referring to here is the mental
ideas which the analyst attaches to arranging the
room, and the mental ideas the analyst has of the
patient's ideas of the analyst's physical room. It
has to do with all the questions the analyst asks
herself when choosing the colour on the wall, the
arrangement of the furniture, the cover on the co-
ach, the pictures on the wall, etc. Here, one may
distinguish between what the analyst consciously
wants to communicate through her arrangement
and what just slips through. A dummy on the floor
definitely belongs to an unintentional act as it is a
sign of the analyst's outer life. The more conscious
choices can, however - depending on the situ-
ation - have an unintended or, at any rate, an un-
expected meaning with the difference in mind, that
here, the focus is on the analyst's inner ideas. A
well-to-do patient from the upper classes activates
completely different ideas about the room in the
analyst than would a patient from a more modest
background. The analyst may experience a change
in her view of the room, ranging from it being
136
rather shoddy, not sufficiently with it and too
much in the style of IKEA, to it being a little too
enviable and if not blatantly conspicuous, then out
of the patient's reach.
However, not only will each of these patients
activate inner representations of the psychoana-
lytic room, but also lead to a chain of associations
which go much further and much deeper into the
analyst as a person. A lecture given by Jacobs at
The International Psychoanalytical Congress in
1993 is an illustration of this. The theme of his
lecture was "From Listening to Interpretation"
and had precisely its focus on what is going on
in the analyst while listening to his patient and
considering his interpretations:
Today as I wait for Mr. V, I am more tense
than usual. I anticipate his criticism of my
new office and I am apprehensive of this.
Mr. V attaches a great deal of importance
to appearances ... My anxiety also reflects
my own dissatisfaction with the office I have
rented ... I am angry with myself for not
having anticipated the problem and invested
in some new furnishings.
Mr. V rings the bell ... , moves quickly into
the room, goes to the couch, unbuttons his
jacket, and stretches out on it. His shoes are
smartly polished, and as he enters the office,
I notice his suit. It is blue, elegant, very Eng-
lish and obviously custom-tailored. I glance
at my own clothes. They are undistinguished
by comparison, a jacket and trousers with-
out panache or flair. By contrast both my
father and my analyst were more like Mr. V.
I think of interpretations that my analyst
made about my non-competitiveness. He
pointed out that I avoided conflict with
other men by opting out of any competition
with them.
This brings me back to Mr. V. I think
about the interaction and I realise that my
transference to Mr. V has drawn much from
my relationship to my father and other male
authorities (Jacobs, 1993, p. 8).
The example takes as its starting point the con-
crete physical room and illustrates how the ana-
lyst's person as a whole, his education, his pre-
vious history, his conscious as well as his uncon-
scious are present in this room. Different aspects
of his personality are activated in the psychoana-
lytic process and form a part of the psychological
material that the analyst is working with when
commenting on the patient's material.
The same movement from the concrete physical
 room to its symbolic meanings is seen when turn-
ing to the other part in the psychoanalytic dia-
logue, the patient's point of view.
The physical room itself, the exact spatial frame
for the analysis, is a sine qua non, and mostly pa-
tients attach the greatest importance to it in this
concrete sense at the beginning of analysis. People
who themselves have not been in analysis, often
ask others who have this experience, about the ex-
act arrangement of the room: "What does it look
like - where will you be waiting if you are too
early - what do you do if you have to go to the
toilet?". And these questions are in fact important
in the first meetings between analyst and patient.
But gradually, as the physical frame becomes more
and more familiar to the patient, the meaning of
this is overlaid by the possibilities this concrete
room and the analyst offer. And the experience of
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this physical room changes in line with this. A
room, which in the patient's experience is friendly
and light, might turn into a cool and impersonal
room, into a dungeon, a womb, etc. As the analy-
sis develops, the transference to the analyst is the
decisive point in the experience of the physical
room. The focus is on the psychological room and
the interaction between the two people involved.
THE ENCLOSED AND OPEN OR THE INVARIABLE
AND UNPREDICTABLE ROOM
The relationship between the psychoanalytic room
in its concrete and figurative sense can be de-
scribed as the enclosed versus the open room, the
invariable versus the unpredictable room. The
concrete room, together with the other elements
which constitute the frame for the analysis and
which are ideally given and invariable, forms the
implicit and tacit background against which the
figure, the unpredictable analytic process, takes
place. Apart from the physical room itself and its
special arrangement, this frame also involves
agreements and rules concerning time, pay, cancel-
lations, holidays, etc., which, apart from keeping
the analyst alive, also aims at keeping the analysis
alive. At the same time, this means that in mo-
ments of crisis, the tacit frame may become noisy
and rather than functioning as background, it be-
comes the figure at which attention is directed.
The analytic relation in itself and the different
positions it involves for analyst as well as patient
are also part of the frame. Psychoanalysis differs
from other human relations by being characterised
by a number of contrasts, which we would nor-
mally find inconsistent in our relations to other
people. At one and the same time, it is marked by
distance and closeness, by objectivity and subjec-
tivity, by emotion and matter-of-factness, by neu-
trality and intimacy. The very fact that two people
meet daily and alone over a long period of time,
creates a special intensity and involvement. More-
over, the background for this meeting contributes
to its intensity and emotionality. Hardly anybody
would enter a long psychoanalysis just for fun, but
rather out of need, desperation and suffering. It
will therefore be deeply personal and often
emotionally charged, painful difficulties, which the
patients communicate to the analyst. Simul-
taneously, the decision is a sign of a wish for and
a willingness to change and also shows confidence
in the fact that this could happen. The hope is that
what the persons on their own have not been able
to do, the analyst can. Motivation, trust and hope,
but also extreme vulnerability are crucial elements
in the analytic relation.
Thus, a developmental optimism is part of the
psychoanalytic frame which at the same time con-
stitutes the basis for an intense emotional relation-
ship. In this relation, the patient's and the analyst's
positions, tasks and freedom are different. It is the
analyst's task to make herself available intellectu-
ally as well as emotionally and try to understand
and create sense through her interventions and re-
ceptivity. Seen from the patient's point of view, the
psychoanalytic room is in its intent - whatever its
quality at a given moment- the place in the world
where you are allowed to be the person you are
without being caught by "the law of Jante" 2 and
where otherwise unsaid things may be said, and
inhibitions and mental blocks against saying them
may be felt. It is a room where emotions, frus-
trations, hate and rage may be expressed without
it having immediate consequences for the patient's
life. In this sense, the psychoanalytic room is, seen
from the patient's point of view, a "free room"
where it is not the external reality which creates
restrictions on what can be and cannot be said,
but the patient's inner fantasies, limitations and
inhibitions and the character of the actual analyst-
analysand relationship. On the other hand, in this
frame, great limitations are set for what the ana-
2
"The Jante Law" refers to an attitude among people char-
acterized by the dictum: You shall not think that you are
special, better or more important than us. It is formulated
by the Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose (1933) and
reformulated by Killingmo (1971) in relation to psychoan-
alysis.
137
 lyst may say. This can, however, be seen as a free-
dom to remain silent.
Dealing with the question of the different posi-
tions occupied by analyst and patient, Modell
(1996) speaks about the affective asymmetry of the
frame. The starting point in itself is an asymmetri-
cal situation. One has difficulties and feels rela-
tively helpless; the other is in the position of offe-
ring help. This asymmetry is further emphasised
by the physical arrangement with one lying down
and another sitting upright, and by the different
kinds of communication that are expected from
the two involved. The patient is encouraged to say
whatever comes to his mind, to associate freely,
where the analyst's task is to think freely but to
time her interventions and ideas and subject them
to the interests of the treatment. It is expected that
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the patient expresses his feelings, whereas the ana-
lyst must restrain herself and solely dedicate her-
self to the goal of understanding the other person's
difficulties and help to relieve them.
The unequal position, which is integrated in the
analytic relation, makes great demands on the
analyst's personal integrity and ethics together
with her ability not to exploit her powerful posi-
tion. On one hand, if the psychoanalytic frame is
seductive in its structure, it must, on the other
hand, be guaranteed and protected from any kind
of seduction. Trust and security against abuse of
any kind, be it ideological, scientific or personaV
sexual, must be an indispensable part of the whole
frame.
A last and very important thing which should
be mentioned in connection with the frame, cen-
tral in making the psychoanalytic room a unique
one, is the concept of time in psychoanalysis. It is
possible to distinguish between limited time and
eternal time, between objective and subjective
time, between linear time and cyclic time. Linear
time passes, cyclic time comes back, objective time
may be divided, enclosed and measured, subjective
time is vague, elusive and hard to catch and define.
In psychoanalysis, the various forms of time are
present simultaneously. The time for a session, for
instance from 8 to 8:45, is the inexorable reality
which demarcates the individual session whatever
happens. The temporal limitation, which becomes
a daily continual occurrence, has a special relation
to the timelessness which can characterize the ana-
lytic room. The experience of time may vary from
the feeling that it drags to the feeling that it sud-
denly vanishes, but in principle, timelessness can
only exist because of the temporal limitation of
138
the individual session. Put in another way, the per-
sons involved need not worry about time since it
is fixed.
The potential timelessness does not only exist
within the single session, but it spans the whole
analytic sequence. As a starting point, psychoan-
alysis is timeless. It means that it is part of the
frame that there can be no agreement in advance
about how long the analysis might last. The logic
behind this is the well-known one that psycho-
logical processes have their own time. Just as one
cannot fall in love to order, the process which po-
tentially develops between patient and analyst can-
not be forced.
Thus integrated in the frame as such, besides
the physical arrangement and the exact agreement
between the two persons involved, is a special ap-
proach to the concept of time as well as rules for
the two persons' communication, behaviour and
ethics - things which must be considered to be
basic conditions for analysis and something that
the patient can rely on, being an objective part of
it.
Just as the purely physical circumstances, the
frame will attract special attention (and resistance)
from outsiders and the person just starting analy-
sis. As mentioned above, it may become the figure
that is in focus if, for instance, the patient is sy-
stematically late, forgets to pay, fails to appear
without notice etc. But ideally it is just there, and
as Bleger (1967) puts it, one does not notice what
is always there unless it is not there. By being con-
stant, the frame gives room for what is not there,
i.e., the process and the development which is the
aim of the analysis.
The relation between frame and process can be
compared with the mother-child relationship on
the assumption that the mother is "good-enough"
as Winnicott puts it. The mother who is there and
who is at her child's disposal creates (by being
there and not attracting attention) a frame, and by
this, room for her child's development. Reversed,
the mother who is not there for her child or who is
everywhere and nowhere, attracts special attention
(the child wants a framework for his life and
clings) and so the child's own sphere of activity is
limited.
The double function of the psychoanalytic
frame can be compared with the frame of a paint-
ing: it demarcates and protects the canvas from the
external world and reality, and at the same time, it
highlights the painting within the frame, the inner
world and the inner reality. Thus, in psychoanaly-
 sis, the special frame is central both in making the
psychoanalytic room a unique one and in forming
the basic conditions for such a room to develop.
PLAY AND REALITY
"No admittance" it says on a slip of paper on the
child's door, "occupied" the sign says on the ana-
lyst's door. Even though there is a difference in
style, both messages signal that something impor-
tant is taking place, something that cannot bear
intrusion and which is of no concern to others.
Play and psychoanalysis have often been com-
pared, especially by Winnicott (l982b) who saw
play as the creative aspect of all human activity
and therefore also the essential element in analysis.
I shall later return to Winnicott's concept of play/
creativity. The main thing here is what one might
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call "the politics of the closed room": the fact that
certain activities presuppose special places which
are protected and enclosed from reality and
which - because of this protection and enclosure -
make rooms unfold. As Virginia Woolf (1945)
points out in her discussion of women and litera-
ture, a room of one's own is a presupposition for
the unfolding of human creativity. Not until the
door is closed - whether it has to do with writing
literature, playing or psychoanalysis - can the
room be turned into a special room with special
rules and roles which are no less real than the ob-
jective reality, but where it is the subjective reality,
the imagination and the unconscious which set the
agenda.
How important the closed door is for the analy-
sis/play to unfold is clearly felt through the shifts
that arise when the outer reality breaks into the
room and withdraws again. It is a common obser-
vation how disturbing and intrusive noise and un-
expected sounds can be felt by the analytic pair
and especially in certain phases of the analysis.
An example of how the absence and rea-
ppearence of the adult world makes room for and
interrupts the child's play is the story "Benny's
Bathtub" (1969) by the Danish author Flemming
Kvist Meller. The plot is based on a trivial every-
day conflict between a mother and her boy. The
boy has been on the moors and has caught a tad-
pole and comes home dirty all over. The mother
is mad at having yet another animal and more
dirty feet on the carpet and orders the animal to
be thrown out and the child to be washed. In the
child's mind, this rather boring reality undergoes
a creative change. The deportation to the bath-
room is experienced as his own choice - he locks
the door from the inside - and the room becomes
the setting for a deep-sea travel with the water in
the bathtub as take-off, enclosed in time by the
mother's leaving and coming back:
But, but, but, always this "but" snaps his
mother, now it is out into the bathroom and
don't come back until you are clean all over
and that little slimy animal of yours has
been flushed out ... SLAM says the door
when she shuts it.
From the bottom of the sea:
Benny hears a rumbling sound, just like a
thunderstorm in the distance. Isn't it some-
one far away calling his name? Suddenly it
occurs to him that it is his mother knocking
on the door, shouting "Benny, answer me -
please - Benny ...". "Goodbye pals, I've got
to go" says Benny before shooting up to the
surface (Meller, 1969).
For Benny (and for the child/the grown-up who
is able to play), water in a bathtub is not just water
in a bathtub. The words are not just associated/
identical with their concrete meaning in the sense
that what is out there is water in a bathtub and
can be nothing else. There is a freedom, a distance
from reality or what with Winnicott (1982a, b) and
Ogden (1985) may be termed a "potential space"
between word and phenomenon. This makes it
possible not only to know what "the water"
means, but also to know that it could mean some-
thing else and to use it as the basis for new cre-
ations: to create a deep-sea ocean out of water in
a bathtub, a frog out of oneself, a friend out of a
tadpole and a ticket-collecting crab with "the
deadliest claw in the deep sea" (which turns out
to be a small pinkish thing) from experiences with
the pompous, rigid and controlling part of the
adult world. In other words, it is the differen-
tiation between symbol, the symbolised and the in-
terpreting subject which makes the creation of a
room - in this case a playroom - possible.
THE POTENTIAL ROOM AND THE ANALYTIC
THIRD
In the first place, psychoanalysis is not concerned
with results, but with processes. As a method of
treatment, its aim is to understand and relieve psy-
chic suffering and help the individual patient grow
139
 and develop (Steiner, 1989). But this is not done
by making exact criteria for a successful result to
which one can determinedly direct one's energies,
but by creating a room where repressed and split-
off parts can be set in motion and brought into
contact. When the door to the outside world is
closed, this room, or rather this potential room, is
established.
Used in this sense, the term "the potential
room" 3 implies that there is no guarantee of what
will happen. The potential is the antithesis of the
given, the predictable, the fixed and the immediate
conscious. The potential refers to possibilities
which are not realised, processes which are not
established, feelings which are not felt, thoughts
which are not thought. Moving into the psycho-
analytic room is thus also a movement into un-
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known territory without foregone conclusions.
Analyst as well as patient contribute to the
establishment of this room. Both step into the
room, each with his or her experiences and point
of departure: the patient with his suffering and his
concretely-lived life, the analyst with his education
and experience, but also with his former and ac-
tual life as the basis from which he takes his crea-
tivity, broadness and limitations. Thus, they step
into the room as separate individuals in order to
work together on a new relationship, a new mutual
room which may throw light on the patient's for-
mer and present life and her relations to herself
and other people.
The psychoanalytic room cannot be described
satisfactorily at the individual level. It is some-
thing different and more than the sum of its parts,
just as a tune cannot be described satisfactorily as
the sum of its notes. The room as metaphor sug-
gests an inter-subjective perspective. The psycho-
analytic room in its concrete, physical sense is
there when the analysis starts, and is the result of
the analyst's work only. The psychoanalytic room
in its figurative sense is something that the two
persons involved create together and fill out and
change in different ways. Not only is this room
created by patient and analyst, but also by the dia-
3 The concept "the psychoanalytic room" and the descrip-
tion of it as being a potential room may be confused with
Winnicott's term "the potential space" (1982c). And they
do overlap, both referring to an intermediate area of ex-
periencing lying between the inner and outer world; but
where Winnicott's term is general covering different areas
of experience and development, the concept "the psycho-
analytic room" is restricted to the psychoanalytic situation
and process.
140
Iogue between them as it is acted out at a con-
scious as well as an unconscious level. It is the in-
teraction between patient and analyst which forms
and creates the psychoanalytic room and gives it
its special atmosphere. Murray Cox describes this
atmosphere as the common air that the two people
in question breathe. This air may be intoxicating,
but also poisoned, and sometimes with so little
oxygen that the room becomes small to the point
of disappearing altogether (Cox, 1988).
Thus, the psychoanalytic room might be experi-
enced as having different qualities at a given time,
but its content cannot be defined. It is a process
in motion created by each analyst-analysand pair,
a process that changes over time on the basis of
the interaction of this pair. It can be compared
to the unique relationship existing between every
individual mother and every individual child.
There are no children, not even siblings or even
identical twins, who, in a psychological sense, have
the same mother. And the two-year-old's mother is
not the same as the thirteen-year-old's. Each single
child's unique character creates special reactions
and evokes special emotional potentials in its
mother which makes remarks like "we have never
made any difference between our children" dis-
turbing rather than reassuring. The potential and
the spontaneous aspects of the interaction have
disappeared and have been replaced by something
static, which means that nothing new can be
created.
For the potential room to use its potential and
turn into a creative room, there must be a "poten-
tial space" in Winnicott's and Ogden's sense. This
means, as shown by ''Benny's Bathtub", that sym-
bol and the symbolised are differentiated, which
makes it possible to depart from reality and play
with it; to create something new without reality as
such is lost, in other words, that different kinds of
reality may exist side by side and that it is possible
to move effortlessly between them.
Transferred to the analytic room, this implies
an acceptance and an understanding of the "as-
if" character of psychoanalysis. An understanding
that the psychoanalytic room represents a reality
cut-off from external reality, and that inside this
special reality, different kinds of reality exist simul-
taneously: that the analyst can be analyst, but at
the same time also be attributed with qualities,
feelings and motives as if she were the patient's
mother. That the patient might experience herself
as an exposed, humiliated and unjustly treated
child without becoming such a child but still stay-
 ing a competent adult who is able to rush on to
chair an important meeting after the analytic ses-
sion.
Moreover, the creativity of the analytic room
presupposes that it is possible to establish a field
or sphere between analyst and patient to which
each contributes and where it is not possible to
answer the question of who has the right to and
the ownership of this sphere. It can be compared
to the creative collaboration where two or more
persons stimulate each others' thoughts and where
one idea after another is conceived. In this kind of
co-operation, thoughts and ideas are created
which none of the persons would have been able
to come up with on their own. It can also be com-
pared to literary experiences. When one reads a
book a voice, a meaning is created which can be
neither attributed to narrator nor to reader, but to
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something that has come into existence in the ten-
sion between reader and writer as two independent
individuals. When such a voice or such a meaning
is created within psychoanalysis, it is referred to
as "the analytic third" (Ogden, 1984). This third is
experienced as particularly perceptible and urgent
when it is missing.
A room is three-dimensional. It is something
that things can be put into, and one can be en-
closed by it. The psychoanalytic room is furnished
with symbols, thoughts, fantasies and emotions,
with transferences and counter-transferences
coming into play between the people involved. But
it is not always experienced like that. At times, the
analytic dialogue can be tedious or rather dead in
the sense that it activates nothing creative. The pa-
tient is talking, but not in order to establish any
contact but rather to create a suitable distance.
The words are copious, but empty in the sense that
they activate neither fantasies nor feelings in the
analyst. Concepts like "father" and "mother" are
said but they stimulate no images; there is no
depth to the words. The persons do not come to
life but appear as cliches. They neither mirror nor
create an inner psychic room in the patient and
analyst, respectively, or between them, and in that
case, the psychoanalytic room can hardly be
characterised as a room, but rather as the poten-
tial room which will hopefully develop during the
course of the analysis.
CONCLUSION
The psychoanalytic room can be understood in
both a concrete and symbolic sense. Symbolically,
its content cannot be defined, but is something
created by the dialogue between the two parts at a
given time. It takes its creative potential from the
psychoanalytic frames and its unstructured
character. Hereby, the psychoanalytic room is dis-
tinguished from the room that life or reality in-
habit. In other more active kinds of therapy, the
task is to adapt the patient to the realities of life
here and now as quickly as possible. In the
psychoanalytic room, there is quite another
agenda, that aims at staying, listening and taking
part in a dialogue with oneself and the other. And
there is no time pressure. Reality demands on ef-
ficiency and rationality are put aside for a while.
In psychoanalysis, analyst and patient turn a deaf
ear to reality, not in order to loose their hearing,
but to concentrate on listening to something else,
listening to themselves and the other person.
The concept of "the psychoanalytic room" is
proposed in this paper as a metaphor trying to
grasp the uniqueness of this uncommon method
and experience. It overlaps with other concepts
like the psychoanalytic frame, relation and pro-
cess, and the relationship between these concepts
can rightly be questioned. A tentative answer to
this question is that the psychoanalytic room is
both a more restricted and inclusive term than the
others. On the concrete level, the psychoanalytic
room is a part of the frames. On the symbolic
level, the frames are a central part in constituting
the psychoanalytic room. Including the psycho-
analytic relation and process, the psychoanalytic
room can be said to be a combination of frame,
relation and process seen from a phenomenologi-
cal point of view. It is a metaphor of how it is felt
to be in analysis and of the process of movement
from being a stranger in the consultation room to
becoming part of a psychoanalytic process that
has been internalised by the analysand.
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