title: The waiting room as boundary and bridge between self-States and unformulated experience.
abstract: For both patient and analyst, the waiting room serves containing and expressive functions. The waiting room may serve as both a boundary between the analytic couple and a bridge to engagement. At times it can provide a means of titrating the intensity and duration of the affects activated by immersion in the analytic process: it can also serve to extend the boundaries of the analytic frame by providing a holding environment to facilitate metabolizing the impact of comings and goings. It also may be viewed as a membrane between self-states through which oscillating facets of dissociated or unformulated experience are enacted. Clinical material from the analysis of an adolescent girl illustrates these ideas.
authors.affiliation: Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Rush University Medical Center, IL, USA. cckphd@aol.com
authors.forename: Christine C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Kieffer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy