The Dark Side of the Frame: Otherness and Breakdowns in Continuity of Being ( Lisa Director Ph.D., New York) (18 Oct 2026)

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Abstract

The frame is the “home” or base of the psychoanalytic process, which involves a person seeking help and the analyst’s offerings in response. The analyst has always been responsible for assuring safety. When in-person work was a given, the warmth and privacy of the consulting room were often equated with safety and care. In contrast, I will discuss the dark side of the frame: the danger that the in-person setting evokes for some adults carrying childhood trauma due to abuse or neglect. It was the reluctance of some patients, post-pandemic, to stop teletherapy and return to my office that alerted me to the danger that in-person work posed, and to the defense that the “screen” offered. Bleger (1967) saw that people dominated by a primitive organization, as some who suffered trauma are, embed that organization in the frame for stabilization.

A change in the frame breaks into this stabilization, forcing early anxieties into the open. While challenging for both patient and analyst, this may provide a means of living trauma anew, toward healing. I will use vignettes to illustrate these phenomena, including the disorganizing impact of my in-person “otherness” on some people who had only worked online, and bodily fragmentation due to the rupture of a stabilizing frame.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the varied components, human and inanimate, that make up the

psychoanalytic frame.

2. Describe the stabilizing function of the frame, and the way that changes in the frame can cause eruptions of early anxieties in some patients.

3. Identify the possible limitations of teletherapy in work with some adults who have histories of childhood trauma.

Biography

Lisa Director, Ph.D. is faculty and clinical consultant at the New York

University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculties of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She has published and presented widely about a variety of subjects including the psychodynamics of chronic substance use, relational innovations in technique, the role of the analyst-as-catalyst, language and expressivity, and the psychoanalytic frame. She is in private practice in New York.

References

Ehrlich, L. T. (2025). Teleanalysis Does Not Have to be “Muted”: On the Crucial Role of the Analyst’s Internal Frame in any Setting. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 73(2), 153-183.

Levine, H. (2024). On the question of the internal frame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 105(2), 234-241.

Trub, L. (2024). The elephant in the room: Will psychoanalysis survive the screen? American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 84(2), 203-228.

Bleger, J. (1967). Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48, 511-519.

Traumaic narcissism (Daniel Shaw LCSW, New York) (15 Nov 2026)

Sun, 15 Nov 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Educating non-analytic colleagues about integrating analytic techniques (Nancy McWilliams, PhD., Lambertville, NJ) (17 Jan 2027)

Sun, 17 Jan 2027 16:00:00 GMT

Detailed description to come. Registration not open yet.

MCPP upcoming events

The Dark Side of the Frame: Otherness and Breakdowns in Continuity of Being ( Lisa Director Ph.D., New York) (18 Oct 2026)

Traumaic narcissism (Daniel Shaw LCSW, New York) (15 Nov 2026)

Educating non-analytic colleagues about integrating analytic techniques (Nancy McWilliams, PhD., Lambertville, NJ) (17 Jan 2027)