A rite of today: the psychoanalytic setting between creativity and coercion, Simona Argentieri Bondi

The author proposes considering the setting as a particular lay rite in the anthropological sense of a procedure that serves to render the experience repeatable so that it becomes meaningful and standard in support of our needs for identity and for belonging. Her intent is not to trace more or less artificial analogies between phenomena and categories that must remain different from each other; but rather to enquire into whether a review of the rite and its anthropological analysis can shed some more light on the nature and meaning of the exterior and concrete 'frame' of our clinical work and on the common roots of these human vicissitudes. She then considers the various dangers that can attack the setting: conscious dangers such as obsessiveness and imitation, and unconscious dangers such as modifications (group), and variations and deviations (individual). Lastly she examines a new and more subtle danger, without theroetic statute or destructive intent: that of negligence, distraction or simple ignorance,that provoke in the setting not so much a break but its fraying and its erosion.