Neutrality in the field: alpha-function and the dreaming dyad in psychoanalytic process

The Portal: Framing and Neutrality in the Age of Virtual Treatment

The author proposes that the concept of framing activity provides a useful approach to neutrality by synthesizing relational approaches with an extension of José Bleger's (1967, 2012) conceptualization of the frame as containing primitive aspects of the analysand. She argues that the analytic frame also serves as a depository, or bulwark, for the analyst's ideological alignments. Identifying how ongoing framing activity is in tension with this bulwark affords a means of approaching, interrogating, and "doing" neutrality that elaborates the flexibility and self-reflection that contemporary psychoanalytic thinking seeks to bring to an earlier, more rigid idea of "the frame." Clinical vignettes focus on framing and its connection to neutrality in the context of remote treatments.