The vast number of scholarly papers on the ground-rules for psychotherapy is evidence of a profound discussion that reaches into the core of the therapeutic theory. From Freud's analytic hour that protects the transference, to major re-workings of frame theory by contemporary relational psychoanalysts, the issue of where and how therapeutic boundaries should be placed leads inevitably to the deeper enquiry of how psychotherapy works.

It has long been agreed that a stable boundary is essential for therapeutic work to occur in a number of ways: by allowing unconscious material such as transference to arise safely - free from social mores or environmental contamination, or as a safe container that offers gratification, nurturance and ego support; as a membrane between the inner and outer domains of the therapeutic relationship that, if managed, well enables the client to test the reliability of another; as a holding environment in which it's safe to explore and express that which is normally unspeakable.

The therapeutic frame has paradoxical properties. It is a line that seeks to minimise uncertainty, but invites the eruptions of the unconscious. It offers containment, and thereby frustrates. It seeks to protect the client from impingement by the therapist in order for that therapist to be experienced as impinging. It raises numerous technical questions: what should be kept out, what should be allowed in? What do we do when a client proposes an alteration of the frame? If moved, can the original frame be restored? Is a rupture best understood as an expression of the patient and therapist's related, dissociated states? Should an interruption in the frame, such as an unexpected phone call, be welcomed as an expression of autonomy or interpreted as a testing of the therapist's capacity to hold?

This is an area of serious complexity and wonderful literature and you are invited to discuss and learn with our speakers to consider how you might want to refine your own theory and placing of therapeutic boundaries.